Unmaking smoking history

Since then, a recession-related falloff in state tax revenues and a reduction in the state income tax rate have led the Legislature and Governor Romney to tap the tobacco funds for other purposes. Spending on tobacco control sank to a meager $2.5 million this year, and Romney wants no increase in next year's budget. As one apparent result of this gutting of the antismoking account, illegal sales to teenagers have soared.

Local health boards and antismoking coalitions last year conducted undercover sting operations using teenage volunteers, who made 7,702 attempts to purchase cigarettes in gasoline stations, convenience stores, and supermarkets. The survey found that the rate of violations in communities that had eliminated tobacco control programs rose from 7 percent in 2002 to 15.4 percent in 2003.

This easier access to cigarettes for minors could reflect an increase in the number of underage smokers. Unfortunately, a 2003 survey of risky behaviors among youth by the state Department of Education will not be published for another month or two. If there is an increase, it means a reversal of the decline in teenage smoking during the years of well-funded tobacco control programs, to which cigarette tax and price increases also contributed. The department's 2002 survey indicated that 26 percent of high school students had smoked in the previous month. In 1995 the incidence was 36 percent.

State antismoking efforts also deserve some of the credit for a 12-year, 52 percent reduction by 2002 in the rate of smoking by pregnant women. That was the steepest reduction recorded in any state and should reduce the incidence of low birth weight babies.

Underfunding tobacco control programs is a textbook case of penny-wise, pound-foolish. Every analysis of the state's budget problems focuses on the accelerating increases in Medicaid. But smoking-related illnesses cost Medicaid about half a billion dollars a year. Skimping on tobacco control now simply ensures that this cost will rise in coming years.

As a spokesman for the state Department of Public Health noted in Tuesday's Globe, ultimate responsibility for cigarette sales to minors rests with retailers. But in a period of lax enforcement, it is all too easy for store employees not to demand proof of age. The state should give cigarette sales enforcement and other tobacco control activities the same high funding priority they had just three years ago.