Spending the settlement

Maine’s Legislature, if its bills and less formal proposals are an indication, is ready to spend the state’s settlement with the tobacco industry. Though much of the legislation is thoughtful and well-intentioned, the amount of the industry settlement was based on the health costs produced by the cigarette habit. Those must be taken care of first.

The state contributes to health-care costs in several ways, primarily through its share of Medicaid payments. As Dr. Stephen Sears, chairman of the Maine Coalition on Smoking or Health, recently commented, those costs as they relate to smoking can be substantial because “tobacco use is responsible for more deaths than alcohol, auto accidents, AIDS, suicides, murders and illegal drugs combined.” These deaths, it needs hardly be said, often are preceded by prolonged illness, caused especially by diseases of the heart and lungs.

The most effective way for Maine to reduce both these illnesses and their associated costs is to persuade teen-agers not to start smoking in the first place. That means an additional part of the settlement money should go toward further increasing the state’s anti-smoking program.

These programs, when aggressively funded over an extended period, have been shown to be effective. Both Massachusetts and California have seen progress their teen-smoking rates after they began anti-smoking campaigns; properly funded, Maine can do it too. Given the state’s highest-in-the-nation smoking rate for teens (nearly one-third report they smoke), using the tobacco money to expand this program would be money well-spent.

Dr. Sears offers two additional reasons for using a chunk of the money to try to reduce smoking. First, no one else will. Unlike the failed federal proposal, the state settlement doesn’t dedicate some of the funding to anti-smoking commercials. Second and as important, it does not keep the industry from spending billions of dollars a year trying to attract new smokers.

Tobacco is a legal business and has a right to sell its products. Maine, as a state — as a community — has a powerful interest in seeing that it sells them a good deal less often here. The settlement money provides an unusual opportunity — Maine rarely has enough cash for anything. This time it does, and it should not waste it.