Tobacco Tax
Dear Editor: If a person wants to use tobacco and ignore the health risks of smoking, dipping and chewing tobacco, then so be it. It is legal to do so. However, tobacco smokers cannot blow smoke in our faces or expect responsible non-smoking taxpayers to subsidize the medical costs of their tobacco habit. It is simply fair and just that the smoking, dipping and/or chewing tobacco addict alone accepts ALL of the responsibility and consequences for the decision to use tobacco.
It is most emphatically not fair to expect the rest of us (80 percent of the USA population) to subsidize their habit. Please note that this is a very costly drug habit with respect to medical costs.
Assemblyman Matt Hunter provided us with the Center for Disease Control data regarding the DIRECT medical care costs for adult smokers (this is a conservative estimate inasmuch as it does not include all uses of tobacco, or the joy of seeing cigarette butts littering our public lands and waters, and does not include smokers under 18 years old) in the U.S. This conservative estimate is $170 billion each year.
This is only the direct medical costs to smokers and does not include costs due to secondhand smoke. Including the medical costs due to secondhand smoke raises the monetary costs to almost $300 billion.
Applying this data from the Center for Disease Control to Sitka, with a population of 9,000, shows annual medical costs due to tobacco smoking to be: Direct – $4,635,000, and Indirect (due to secondhand smoke) – $3,546,000, with a total annual cost of
$8,181,000 or $909 per Sitkan or $4,505 per Sitka smoker. In other words, by spreading the costs out by picking every Sitkan’s pocket, the smoker doesn’t have to pay the other $3,636 they cost the entire community. Obviously, tobacco smokers in Sitka are not paying all of the costs of tobacco smoking themselves, and the rest of us (including Sitka community Hospital) are being milked by the tobacco smoking free-riders. Current tobacco tax revenues provide $450,000 per year to Sitka Community Hospital.
The idea that some members of the Sitka Assembly seem to think that non-smoking citizens should be concerned about the poverty-stricken tobacco addict’s ability to afford his/her drug habit is preposterous.
Somehow these smokers can afford to buy cigarettes at almost $10 per pack, which is an annual outlay of $3,650. What a coincidence. This pack a day habit is almost the same as the costs the tobacco smokers pass on to the non-smoking taxpayer.
We should be concerned about who is being compelled to subsidize (with higher insurance premiums, medicaid, Obamacare, free SCH emergency room care, unpaid bills, etc.) tobacco related health care, which is a 100 percent preventable medical problem. It is entirely inappropriate to consider tobacco related medical problems as being in the same class as communicable diseases or diseases like malaria. Tobacco smoking is a choice considered by tobacco smokers to be a right. OK. Then I have the right to expect tobacco smokers to pay all of the costs associated with their choice.
The issue is simply whether or not the non-smoking public is responsible for subsidizing tobacco addicts. Somehow tobacco gets free pass when people talk about drug abuse. In fact, it meets the definition for a Schedule I drug, substance, or chemical which are
defined as drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. Schedule I drugs are the most dangerous drugs of all the drug schedules with potentially severe psychological or physical dependence. Tobacco abuse causes more deaths and medical problems than all other drugs combined. It’s worse than alcohol, meth, cocaine, heroin, and other Schedule 1 drugs.
So, the above data shows that doubling the tobacco tax isn’t enough to meet the requirement for equity. It also shows that it is not really a tax. It is a demand for payment. I have rights too, and one of them is that I do not have to subsidize the bad behavior of drug addicts.
Dr. Ronald E. Dick, Sitka
