Tennessee has failed to fund anti-smoking programs
Editorial, published the Kingsport Times-News, January 1, 2006

Approximately seven years after reaching a wallet-stretching $21.3 billion in legal settlements with the tobacco industry, most states are failing to keep their original promise to use a significant share of the money to deal with the public health problems caused by smoking.

Only four states currently fund tobacco prevention programs at the minimum level recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, and Tennessee is not one of them.

How low does Tennessee go? Certainly lower than Maine, which ranks first. Lower than Mississippi, which ranks fourth. Lower than Arkansas, which ranks fifth. Lower than Virginia, which ranks 24th, and Kentucky which ranks 37th. Lower than Texas, which ranks 40th, and Kansas, which ranks 41st. Lower still than Florida, 43rd, or even Alabama, which ranks 44th.

Tennessee is - drum roll, please - dead last, a distinction it shares with Washington, D.C., Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

The rankings, developed by the Washington-based Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, use the CDC's estimate of how much funding would be required by each state to reduce smoking and its harm to health. Tennessee's bottom-of-the-pile ranking is made even more shameful by the information contained in other, earlier reports, like that from the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, where Tennessee has the dubious distinction of ranking at the top of the pile in the rate of illegal tobacco sales to teens.

This report is merely the latest in a long line of troubling studies which note Tennessee's extraordinarily high rates of smoking among teens as well as the state's alarming lack of smoking prevention programs. The intent of the tobacco settlement fund was to help ameliorate the harm done by tobacco products. It is disgraceful and tragic that the state is not using those funds for the primary purpose for which they were intended. Instead, the millions in tobacco settlement money have been used to cover the state's previous budget shortfalls.

The Centers for Disease Control estimates that Tennessee should be spending a minimum of $32.3 million for no-smoking programs, but the CDC's upper recommendation on spending is roughly three times that amount: $89 million. But if next year is anything like previous years, Tennessee will only spend $1.5 million on smoking prevention and treatment programs - pocket change in a $25 billion annual budget.

Meanwhile, taxpayers find themselves continuing to foot the bill for the very health-care problems the tobacco settlement monies were supposed to address.

In Tennessee and in most other states, anti-tobacco groups' and health care agencies' hopes of reducing tobacco and cigarette consumption has foundered because lawmakers have decided to allocate their portion of the tobacco settlement money to other areas.

These are penny-wise, but pound-foolish decisions that ignore the conclusive evidence that tobacco prevention programs not only reduce smoking and save lives, but save far more money than they cost by reducing smoking-caused, health-care expenditures.

Lawmakers need to adequately fund smoking prevention programs. Such a commitment would not only improve Tennesseans' overall general health, it would also represent the single most fiscally responsible investment this state could make.

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