According to a new report from several public health organizations, including the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association, and the American Cancer Society, in 2013 states will spend less than two percent of their annual tobacco tax and revenues from the Master Settlement Agreement to combat smoking. The report states that from the approximately 25.7 billion dollars states collected from the 1998 MSA, only 460 million dollars will go to smoking prevention and treatment programs.
Beginning with the first payments from the big tobacco companies to the states, public health groups noted that the states were routinely violating their pledges to spend at least half of the bounty on anti-tobacco programs. The states' failures to reverse cuts to tobacco prevention and cessation programs "have undermined the nation's efforts to reduce tobacco use," the report said. "Given such a strong return on investment, states are being truly penny-wise and pound-foolish in shortchanging tobacco prevention and cessation programs."
This is something we see every year, says ACSH s Dr. Elizabeth Whelan, it s a shame to see that the money allotted to saving thousands of lives is being utilized for other programs.
ACSH s Dr. Josh Bloom is a bit more cynical. He says, I don t believe for one second that the money collected by the states was ever intended to go to anti-smoking efforts. As we here at ACSH asserted from the start, this was a classic shakedown. The states wanted the money for their own uses and the tobacco companies paid a huge amount of protection money in the form of a fine so that they were immune from endless lawsuits and could conduct business as usual. In the end, everyone won except for the smokers who were supposed to get the help. Our government at its finest.