Arkansas Blog

"(Note: at a rate of a pack a day, the decline in smoking has cost the state $18 million in revenue annually.)"

And, saved the state $20 million annually in the cost of health care.

Fewer people are smoking everywhere. The drop is not the result of the state wasting millions of tobacco settlement money on advertising.

Stop wasting the money on advertising and help provide medication that helps people actually stop smoking. Don't expect the press to compare the drop with other states that don't waste money on stupid stop smoking ads. The media makes way too much money off the waste.

Every paper that prints this press release without challenging its claims should disclose how much of the tobacco money it has received.

I can remember back in the not-so-distant past when the Hogs were playing night games in LR. In the stands on the opposite side of the field, you could see steady, fascinating bursts of tiny flames from cigarette lighters and matches as literally thousands of fans fired up their smokes. Ya don't see that anymore, and I say that's a good thang.

Amen brother reallawyer! No one has called or come by to see if we're cutting back at my house. If they had they'd see we set our alarm clocks early so we can get more smoking in per day. I wonder if I ran a newspaper ad that touted my ability to stay erect 16% longer than most men of my age, if my wife would have more sex with me?

Why not? Endless groups publish all kinds of crap honking their own horn and no one goes back to check their figures. It's like TV stations that run ads all day and night tell you how great THEY are. A pamphlet isn't going to help me quit smoking and funny, since I've lived in Arkansas since 1961, I haven't even got a pamphlet. The tobacco blackmail money has only helped those hired with the tobacco blackmail money. Why not use the money to provide real help? The stop smoking aids next to the tobacco products at Walgreens cost more than a carton of cigarettes, so I go for the cigarettes every time.

I don't go to church, but I don't mind if everyone else does. I smoke, but I don't care if no one else does. Remember freedom of choice? Ah...it was great! Remember when everyone minded their own business? No....well....actually, I don't either, but it used to be better than it is now.

I'll let you in on a little secret...I'd like to quit smoking. I figure 35 years is enough, plus I have projects I'm racing to complete and smoking gets in the way. Smoking costs too much, but then so does everything else. I'll be sorry to see my last sin go away.....smoking is a very comforting friend late at night when you're studying something real hard. But being over 50 means your body starting to shut down, things going wrong, other stuff you can't do any more. So the cigarettes need to go. Funny how writing about this makes me smoke more....silly brain and body!

I know smoking isn't good for you, but neither are Cheetos, Twinkies, Taco Bell....which I noticed last night at the drive thru window is promoting eating 4 meals a day.....neat! A 60 year Swedish study of identical twins released last year shows that death is random. They're study indicates that if your identical twin died this year of lung cancer, you'll probably live another 10 years and die of something else.

It would be so great to say that smoking will kill you or that eating carrots will let you live to be 79, every time....just get ya some carrots. But nothing in life is that simple. Healthy people drop dead. Super well attended children die. Nasty old winos, who do everything wrong, seem to live forever. Life is a crap shoot.

Trying to live a healthier life is always a good idea. From my sideways study it appears that exercise is the best thing you can do and I'm not talking weight room stuff, just keep moving, don't sit around...walk. You're body is like a load of concrete in a cement mixer. When you turn off the movement, it will set up on you. I'm happy people are living healthier, but on the other hand having had recent rest home experience, those who drop dead at 50 are far luckier than those who cannot die. Cancer of the everything is a gift from Allah compared to 1 year in any rest home. Healthy old bodies with an Alzheimer's brain is worse than AIDS.

So as I light up another Marlboro Light I ponder what we should do. Enjoy life to the fullest and be happy with the years you get or spend every waking moment attempting to live to be 100? A 101 year old recently told me to never wish to live to be 100. She said it's no fun. Everyone is dead, you have tons of time to do things, but you don't want to do anything any more. It's lonely and boring and not what we're here for. And this coming from an active, alert, 101 year old woman with all of her needs in life tied up in a nice bow.

Oh well...to each his own. It's just harder these days to protect your own, everyone wants to tell you what to do. Everyone wants to scare you to death....where's the group to stop all that? And what happened to the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Reallawyer is on target. Regional stop smoking clinics would have been great. I suppose they do some type of programs in high schools to help students understand the huge risks involved with sucking carbon monoxide and 117 other carcinogens deep into your lungs. When I was in high school my football coach smoked, my favorite teacher smoked and our minister smoked. Environment and leadership does matter. Tobacco companies still target the 16-20 yr old population. They understand early addiction better than anyone.

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>>the top three causes of death in the state which are heart disease, stroke and cancer.<<

I wonder when "old age" will be cause of death? At 79, 84, or 91 is a heart attack or stroke still
listed as "a cause of death?" I mean heart failure seems to be involved in about 99.99% of all deaths.
.

Smoking in 'public'/enclosed places is still analogous to pissing on someone's leg - actually, it's WORSE. WHEN will our esteemed Ledge fix the bogus "ban" that still keeps us from enjoying most live music venues in LR/NLR?!! People who want to smoke in bars, etc. should have to wear an inverted fishbowl; do you ever see THEM inhaling the "business end?" GAAK...
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You know, Inchman, Your keep moving advice is just about spot on. But the quit smoking aids are another scam unto their own selves. Many people respond to different medications differently and to assume a pill is gonna help someone quit an addiction more powerful than heroin or cocaine when the cues to smoke are all around is just bogus. That's why the litany of effective prevention remains: Taxes, tobacco free space,,marketing reform , and cessation support. Reallawyer, pouring money into cessation is not cost effective. There has to be a comprehensive program. Effective tobacco control is an effort to de-normalize tobacco use. Now whether you like it or not media plays a great part in this effort. I'm not convinced that the CJRW campaign has been all that great. And I recently heard that 40% of Arkansans have called the national number before the state quit line. It forwards calls directly back but if the campaign were more successful there wouldn't be those numbers. My understanding that there is gonna be a new vendor for the quit line soon too. But media efforts multiply anything you do, if used correctly.
I could grouse a lot about ADH's tobacco prevention program but it wouldn't serve much purpose here. I will note that Joe Thompson's $10.28 per pack in actual costs is higher than the last numbers I've seen. Prevention is always more effective than treatment. If we wait until folks are as old and jaded as Inchman to get them to try and quit we'll end up spending a butt load more than if he'd never gotten addicted.
And Fletch, I don't know how you extrapolate$18 mill in lost revenue vs $22mill in health care savings. Tobacco taxes do not even begin to support the subsidy we pay allowing the tobacco unfettered access to our children and communities. Check out Tobacco Free Kids they have all kinds of well documented data available. http://www.tobaccofreekids.org/index.php
Ok. Gotta run there are four horses in the yard that I don't know. and I think I got into the seed ticks.

They say for every cigarette you smoke you lose two minutes off your life.

I should call my doctor and tell him I died eighty years ago.

It's like so many other things out there ... a vicious circle. Uncle Herb dies, he's a smoker so naturally that's why. Aunt Bessie tells everyone at the wake that Herb smoked too much and thatmight have been a cause. Cousins Timmy and Amy go to colleges across the country and they
tell their friends about Uncle Herb. Someone in that group of friends wants to save the world and everyone from themselves so they start a cause; " Ban Cigarette Smoking all over the world". Then those with not enough to do grab hold and run with it! Some illustrias polition needs to drumb up votes so he also grabs the ring and "Away We Go !!!!".
Seems like everything we eat, drink or do is gonna kills us one way or the other and life is short anyway. So, let's enjoy life as we want, not condemn our neighbor for not having the same morals as we do and be free.
This will probably stur the pot so one other comment; if it's not about you keep your nose out and for bush, the Olymipcs are about sports not politics. Get the hell out of there and leave the Chinese government and way of life alone. It's none of your damn business! And quit trying to provoke another nation into hating the US.

ArkansasGrizz: At the risk of "sturring the pot," It IS about me.

If I have to breathe your smoke, that's about me.

If your lung cancer, throat cancer, heart disease, etc., etc., etc., drive up my insurance premiums, that's about me.

It's like that proposed coal-fired electricity plant proposed for Hempstead county: It's not just their air pollution. Their air pollution doesn't stay in Hempstead county; they share it with the entire state--well, at least those who are down wind of it.

If you don't smoke where I have to breathe the air, I don't object to your smoking on that ground.

But if your smoking drives up my health insurance rates, I object--and I have every right to object!

Grizz, the mortality rate due to the tobacco industry's exploitation of our society is not anecdotal. This is CDC data. And one thing very clear is that our politicians and policy makers have as a group failed miserably to challenge the tobacco industry. There are evidence based best practices for tobacco control that politicians have overwhelmingly ignored or failed to fund at recommended levels. Unfortunately, very few politicians have the courage to take up the mantle against a multi national corporate rogue predator with the resources of the tobacco cartel.
fyi, the tobacco industry in 2006 was convicted of racketeering and fraud under federal statues generally reserved for organized crime. Count the bodies. Count the lies.

I've been watching the smokers at the U of A since the tobacco ban. They all go out to a street right-of-way to get off U owned property. Now, in addition to the carbon monoxide in the one cigarette smoked on a break, they get to inhale the equivalent of about 100 cartons from car exhaust and bus fumes.

Tobacco made this country, because many people like to smoke. The Europeans went crazy over the sot weed. Prohibition will not work. Ostracizing smokers isn't going to stop us. It just annoys us.

I once worked a job where any scent of tobacco, or perfume, shampoo or anything that anybody could have a chemical sensitivity to, was strictly verboten for important medical reasons. I abstained all day, but by bedtime I'd always manage to smoke the same amount, a pack a day. Some smoke more, some less. It is an addiction, and everybody has a different saturation point.

Smokers need some places to go. Bars with live music need the smoker's money. We probably drink more and tip more too. We're more fun and less hung up about what other people do. We're just not as judgmental because we live in smoke houses that don't stop rocks. I think the problem of mixing smokers and non-smokers in the same building could be fixed by engineering. On the Mark in Fayetteville has an HVAC system that disappears the smoke. Instead of making spaces habitable for those with and without the habit, the push has been to eliminate places where smokers can go, so we go where we're allowed to smoke, and it can get damn smoky in there without proper ventilation.

I'd like to see a bar where smoking is required. If you take a break between smokes, you have to go outside, but I'd never force people onto street rights-of-way with the bus fumes and deadly CO, even non-smokers, as puritanically righteous as they may be.

Thanks Crum, you exposed a real tactic the industry has used. Hate to break the news but this isn't about you. Hell, you're a victim, Quasimodo. The industry has been documented to have financed decades of public relations campaigns trying to frame the debate about smokers' rights. Smoking is a privilege. Breathing is a right. The only way the conversation is about you is as a victim. If the tobacco industry hadn't addicted you in your teens you'd spend just as much, tip just as well, and have just as much fun but you wouldn't have catastrophic health care costs and dollars every day supporting a nicotine addiction to look forward to. And no one else would be exposed to your secondhand smoke and inappropriate example to youth.

No one ever heard of smokers' rights until the tobacco industry started funding, and creating, front groups for their marketing and PR campaigns. Hell, they are still doing it.

Civil rights refer to people not behaviors like smoking. Folks have even tried to get the courts to classify smokers as a protected group under the ADA. Didn't work. And neither will defending an industry that kills more Americans than Hitler every year as some kind of right to public nicotine addiction.

I've seen ninety year old people who smoked will over 70 years die the day their cigarettes were taken away. And no, they weren't suffering from Cancer or on oxygen.. non smokers were trying to help them live longer is all. I've seen people trapped upside down in auto accidents, burn to death because their seat belts would not come undone.

But I've never seen a pamphlet or heard of an offer of assistance beyond UAMS.. "come on down - it's just a few hundred miles" to quit smoking in AR.

Take my darn smoking taxes and spend it on cleaning up after Chesapeake gas drilling or something which is actually meaningful and or effective. Use my smoking taxes to buy off the Game and Fish commission.. Call it the "Butt out of our WMA campaign."

Maybe the new lottery should have instant winners for free stop smoking medical assistance within your zip code prizes?

Eureka, Right where you are sitting is as far as you need to go to quit smoking. It took angioplasty to get me to quit. And , yeah making a 90 year old quit has a diminishing return. However, the ACS has some pretty good data on how many years one can save quitting at any age.
Quitting tobacco is a difficult personal challenge for some. Others just quit. More and more research is going down on genetic predispositions. One thing is much clearer: there are social predispositions that enable tobacco companies to market w impunity. This costs us all in dollars and lives.
And absolutely should your tobacco taxes be spent toward prevention and cessation. The % of the MSA that funds tobacco prevention in AR amounts to only about $15 million. Tobacco taxes yield a modest $127 million even though health care costs for smoking related disease tap out at over $800 million. The industry itself spends $160 million on marketing.
Hell, yes, make your tobacco taxes work. And one way to make them work is to raise them. The research line is a 7% reduction among youth and 4% overall for every 10% that cigs go up. We can help you quit by making tobacco cost more, making you go farther and wait longer to smoke, and by reducing the sort of cues to make you want to smoke like ads or others smoking around you. Imagining that meds are required actually goes against conventional cessation research. Most people successfully quit cold turkey.
See a physician. If you need meds to quit there are all sorts of opportunities. Hell, Glaxo smith Kline has a program to dispense free meds. But first, decide to quit.
In the meantime, contact your representative and tell them how under funded (84.3% of CDC minimum) tobacco prevention is in Arkansas.

Skypilot and Zara, I agree it is about you if it's forced upon you. It's not about you if you are a non smoker (which I am). The ban is another good idea which has been blown completely out of control by the radical that don't have enough to do. Smokers and non smokers have gotten along pretty good for very many years, them on one side and the others on the others. I personally hate going into a restaurant and having the smell of smoke while I'm eating. Conditions can be arranged to draw both smokers and non smokers. Just don't make a non smoker sit in a smoking section and make sufficient arrangements so neither is affected by the other.
Let's not get carried away. We all have rights and we shouldn't force our beliefs another.
If I happen to go to a bar I expect to be in a smoking area. If I go to a restaurant I expect to have a place to eat away from the smoke, but I'm not going to force that on the smokers. Hell the hardest part of quitting smoking was having a beer without one!

Sorry Grizz, but the preventable loss of over 400,000 american lives every year carries me away. The 'accommodation' argument once again tries to equate nicotine addiction with the right to breathe.
There is no right to smoke and it is not a belief but science that demonstrates that secondhand smoke will kill you. I don't want to get along w the people, the industry, which kills people as a matter of course.

The ease with which you parrot the tobacco cartel again shows how successful unrestrained capitalists can be.

What about all that tobacco settlement money.. wasn't it supposed to fund cessation assistance?

On a related note .. a snip from roll call (no link subscription only)

RollCall

The campaign of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Sen. John
McCain (Ariz.) is declining to embrace McCain's own 1998 tobacco bill,
legislation that would have raised taxes to the tune of $516 billion
over 25 years.

The bill, among the decade's major pieces of legislation, would have
amounted to one of the largest tax increases in history. It died on
the Senate floor after backers fell just three votes short of the 60
needed to overcome procedural hurdles.

McCain, whose credentials as a tax cutter are suspect among many on
the right, was the author and driver of the bill. Even so, leading
conservatives today are generally willing to forgive the Arizona
Senator for what they view as his transgression on the tobacco
measure.

SNIP

Eureka, three things happened in the 20th century to institutionalize tobacco use. The states started taxing tobacco in the early 1900s. Tobacco companies started putting cigs in soldiers rations. And the Master Settlement Agreement. The MSA was an agreement between the tobacco companies and the state's to make some minimal concessions for a huge, but absorbable, chunk of change. Nowhere in the agreement does it say how the states spend this money. The states' use of MSA monies to control tobacco has been abysmal. Arkansas actually is ranked like 8th for tobacco control spending and brags about being the only use of MSA monies totally health related. That is the result of the CHART efforts to pass the voter mandated Act 1 of 2000 distributing Arkansas' share.

MSA monies have been squandered and we continue to see business as usual for the tobacco industry. Litigation is their meat and potatoes and the tobacco companies made out like bandits on that one.

McCain to his credit was one of the chargers in tobacco prevention 10 years ago pushing the first efforts at FDA regulation. (Before the current Marlboro Protection Act that just passed in the House fyi how I feel about that.)
The good/bad news about Arkansas' falling smoking rate is that this is not the national trend. And this pattern follows a decreasing funding of tobacco prevention programs around the country.