More Anti-Smoking Follies

This article laments that the states are, for the most part, using the much-touted tobacco settlement on all sorts of things other than "smoking prevention." Good! If they are to get a windfall, which they shouldn't have in this case, they should use it to the best advantage of the common good. Now, if the logic for the settlement was that the money was to compensate states for medical costs, an assumption that is absurd, but that is the rhetoric behind it, then the money they spent was a shame because they should have been spending their money on all sorts of other things. So when the money comes in, it should be spent on those things that were allegedly ignored.

Now, how about that notion that smoking costs states money? Well, if, and that is a big if, one that rests on the secular neo-Puritan assumption that all smoking results in disease and death, smoking results in massive premature deaths, then smoking has saved the states money. Because a forgotten fact is that we have a 100% mortality rate. A jogging, teetotalling non-smoker is eventually going to die, and with the state of modern health care, his death is going to be an expensive one. Not only that, but if we take the notion that a smoker is cutting down his life by 14 years (one figure that has been bandied about recently), that is 14 years off the latter years of his life, years that in the healthiest people generally see more sickness. In 14 years, a nonsmoker can rack up quite a health tab these days. So, if someone's excessive smoking kills him at 68, we can be pretty confident that his nonsmoking brother, who lives to 82 is going to have a variety of treatments for the natural ailments of old age that the smoker will not need (and at inflationary prices, or even higher, as medical costs are outstripping inflation). Also, think of the retirement burden that has been lifted from society from the premature death!

However, the idiocy that "smoking costs society" is held as something self-evident.

What it boils down to is the old notion of a "sin tax." States with high tobacco taxes, provided that they aren't so high that they engender a black market, as they have in many parts of Europe, rely on people continuing to buy cigarettes. If they lost this tax revenue, they would be strapped. They know this. So they have just enough anti-smoking propoganda to continue to demonize "the evil weed" and to justifu the taxes. The societal cost of smoking is nothing more than a cynical smokescreen.