smoking – Memphis Flyer

PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Tennessee ranks 34th in the nation in funding programs to protect kids from tobacco, according to a national report released today by a coalition of public health organizations.

Tennessee currently spends $10 million a year on tobacco prevention programs, which is 31 percent of the minimum amount of $32.2 million recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Last year, Tennessee ranked last in the nation, spending nothing on tobacco prevention.

The report’s key findings for Tennessee include:

— Tobacco companies spend more than $406 million a year on marketing in
Tennessee. This is more than 40 times what the state spends on tobacco
prevention.

— Tennessee this year will collect $511.5 million from the tobacco settlement and tobacco taxes, but will spend just 2 percent of it on tobacco prevention.

Earlier this year, the state Legislature approved a plan proposed by Governor Phil Bredesen to allocate $10 million for programs to keep kids from smoking and help smokers quit, a historic move for a state that has no history of spending money on tobacco prevention. Bredesen also proposed and the legislature approved a new smoke-free workplace law and a 42-cent increase in the state cigarette tax.

Said William V. Corr,
Executive Director of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids: “Despite this
progress, Tennessee still spends less than a third of the CDC’s recommended
minimum for tobacco prevention. It’s critical that Tennessee build on its
progress because tobacco companies are spending huge sums to market their
deadly and addictive products. Tobacco prevention is an important investment
that protects kids, saves lives and saves money for taxpayers by reducing
tobacco-related health care costs.”

Nine years after the 1998 state tobacco settlement, the report finds that the states this year have increased total funding for tobacco prevention programs by 20 percent, to $717.2 million. But most states still fail to fund tobacco prevention programs at minimum levels recommended by the CDC, and altogether, the states are providing less than half what the CDC recommends.

Only three states — Maine, Delaware and Colorado — currently fund tobacco prevention programs at CDC minimum levels.

Kicking Butts

Why are citizens who are old enough to smoke losing their jobs in bars and restaurants? Because of the recent ban on public smoking, bars and restaurants that do allow smoking must now deny access to anyone under 21. That means bar backs, waiters, and hosts who are at least 18 (the legal smoking age in Tennessee) can fire up at home, in the car, on the sidewalk, or anywhere else smoking is permitted. They just aren’t allowed to have their jobs anymore.

Earlier this week, WKRN news of Chattanooga quoted a 20-year-old former bar employee named Rena Doss who complained, “I don’t smoke, and nobody was blowing smoke in my face. … This was a good-paying job for me, and I have bills to pay.” Experts have since suggested that Rena and others like her could relocate to Memphis, where the recently reelected Mayor Willie Herenton has stated that he can do nothing to stop crime, in order to pursue careers in professional thuggery.

The Dismal Life

In a recent column, The Commercial Appeal‘s managing editor Otis Sanford informed CA readers that there is (“sadly”) a “dismal side of Memphis.”

“It’s thrust on us regularly,” Sanford claims, “thanks to a large criminal element and some in the media who believe discord should lead the news. It also comes to us courtesy of a few self-serving politicians, their enablers, and charlatans posing as Internet bloggers.” Although it’s never surprising to hear a representative of mainstream media lumping bloggers into the same category of blight as criminals and cancer, it’s particularly troubling in this case. After all, the CA has repeatedly front-paged negative political stories broken by charlatan bloggers days earlier. Perhaps Sanford, following another dismal trend, no longer subscribes to his own paper.