Tobacco dreams – which one for Maine?

I have a dream that one day, 40 years from now, I am standing at the top of a hill looking at the results of a decision now before Maine’s Legislature (and looking like Paul Newman). In one direction I can see a Maine that failed to spend its national tobacco settlement dollars on improving the health of its people. In the other, I see a Maine that constitutionally protected those settlement dollars for the purposes for which they were intended; getting Mainers unhooked from cigarettes, keeping Maine’s children from ever getting hooked, and generally improving the health of Maine’s people.

LD 1612 is a proposed law to embed protection for the Fund for a Healthy Maine in Maine’s constitution. The FHM is part of the money from Maine’s share of the national tobacco settlement, the landmark deal that forced the tobacco industry to cough up billions annually in compensation to states for the costs of caring for patients afflicted with smoking-related diseases. FHM dollars are currently used to fund smoking prevention and cessation projects across the state, have been highly effective in reducing smoking rates in Maine, and are constantly threatened by other budget needs.

The view from the two directions could not be more different. In one direction there are thousands of people involved in the happy chaos of living in Maine. (There are also a bunch of New Yorkers forking over large amounts of their cash to buy bronzed Maine moose poop.) In this view only 20 percent of Mainers smoke, and only 5 percent of Maine teenagers. That’s the Maine in which the tobacco settlement money was constitutionally protected and spent the way it should be.

In the other direction is a Maine in which tobacco settlement dollars were not invested in the future of Maine’s health. It has more roads and bridges in it, built by tobacco money. But smack dab in the middle of it is a cemetery with white crosses and memorials as far as the eye can see, crosses of Mainers who died from smoking-related illness, and memorials to opportunities lost because the tobacco settlement money was not invested in Maine’s future health.

The difference in the two views really is just as clear as that. On the one side are thousands of unnecessary deaths, and countless missed opportunities to save health care dollars by preventing tobacco-related disease. On the other side is a healthier Maine.

On the one side Maine’s smoking rate is cut in half from its current rate. Only 1,050 Mainers die each year from lung cancer, heart attacks, emphysema, strokes and other tobacco-related diseases, and only 4,650 are hospitalized. On the other, 2,100 Mainers die each year and 9,300 are hospitalized.

On one side are memorials to billions of wasted dollars; wasted taxpayer dollars, and wasted Maine businesses dollars, all spent on health care costs for smokers. On the other side those tax dollars go to education, or stay in our pockets, and the business dollars are invested in business growth and new jobs.

My dream is about a Maine 40 years from now because today’s battle in the Legislature for LD 1612 is in part about our current children, who are looking at cigarettes and deciding if they will become smokers. About 3,800 Maine youths become addicted smokers each year, and about 33,000 Maine teenagers currently alive will die prematurely from tobacco-related disease.

A Maine girl who smokes for the rest of her days will, on average, die 14 years sooner than her nonsmoking girlfriend. That’s not a dream; that’s a preventable nightmare.

In my dream I am standing there with a Maine child asking “Why didn’t Maine spend that money on our future?” She asks why we picked roads over the future health of her generation, and why we conceded the future of Maine’s children to the tobacco industry, which nationally spends $20 million a day getting people to smoke. She asks why we betrayed the trust of all of those smokers whose deaths and illnesses justified the tobacco settlement in the first place, by failing to use their blood money to prevent others from sharing their fate. She asks why we allow the tobacco industry to pay its settlement billions, charge it back to smokers in the form of higher prices, and then laugh at us as we failed to use that money to get its claws out of smokers and our children.

Damn good questions. The answer is to dream of a better Maine, to choose a different vision for Maine’s children, and to fight tooth and nail with the tobacco industry for their future. The answer is for Maine’s Legislature to pass LD 1162, which will constitutionally protect Maine’s tobacco settlement dollars for the healthy future of Maine.

Erik Steele, D.O. is a physician in Bangor, an administrator at Eastern Maine Medical Center, and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region. He writes a biweekly column for the BDN.