Puff On This: Increase The Cigarette Tax

November is Lung Cancer Awareness Month, and the Great American Smokeout is today, the day when the American Cancer Society urges people to quit -- or make a plan to quit -- smoking.

Many will try to kick the habit and many will fail, so some advocate for making the habit too expensive to afford otherwise.

If approved by California voters on the June 5, 2012 ballot, the California Cancer Research Act will increase tobacco taxes by $1 a pack and invest the revenues in cancer research, tobacco prevention and enforcement programs.

According to backers of the Act, if the measure passes nearly $600 million will be generated every year for cancer research in California, making the state one of the leading centers of cancer research in the world.

There is wrangling that goes on among special interest groups about how cigarette tax money should be allocated, but that's a non-starter for Richard Fischel, M.D., a thoracic surgeon and Orange County leadership board member for the American Lung Association in California.

“Who cares where the money goes?” he said. “Throw it in a big hole and bury it if it will keep kids from starting to smoke.”

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 3,400 young people start smoking every day.

“They don’t know that they’re on a 40- to 50-year track of smoking,” Fischel said. He sees families of cancer patients who smoke and has taken care of patients whose lung cancer was caught early, treated with surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation and whose prognosis could be positive, but who continue to light up.

In spite of increasing limitations on where people can smoke, higher cigarette taxes, more vivid warnings on cigarette packages, and multiple campaigns graphically illustrating the hazards of smoking, 50 million Americans continue to light up. Each year, 443,000 people die prematurely from smoking or exposure to secondhand smoke, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“The addiction is very powerful,” Fischel said. “You can show people the scary blue guy in a wheelchair with oxygen, or put a skull and crossbones on cigarette packages with a warning that says, ‘This will absolutely, positively shorten your life and give you a terrible disease from which you will suffer,’ and smokers will read that while lighting up. It’s not a rational thing,” he said.

Fischel favors continuing to educate the public about the dangers of smoking and raising cigarette taxes to the point where the habit is “so unaffordable, inconvenient, and uncomfortable that it goes away.”