Guest Column: SB 54: Tobacco fund cuts are a bad way to balance a budget by Dr. Allen Nord

SB 54: Tobacco fund cuts are a bad way to balance a budget
by Dr. Allen Nord

Tobacco use is a grave public health threat, perhaps the worst you or somebody you love might ever face.

Tobacco use causes dire consequences, increasing risk for 12 types of cancer. Smokers, on average, die 10 years earlier than those who never have done so.

This has been known publicly for decades.

But apparently not to outgoing Gov. Kristi Noem proposed in her last budget for our state that we should raid funds from South Dakota’s tobacco education and cessation efforts while growing the general fund to the tune of $3 million in taxpayer money.  It is now moving through the process as Senate Bill 54, is through the Senate and is now in House Appropriations. It could be a reality in the very near future.

One of the most important tools in the prolonged fight against tobacco is education about its dangers. This is especially true to our youth, who are particularly susceptible to the constant marketing of corporate tobacco companies who make great efforts to present their products as fun and even safe.

As a longtime South Dakota physician, now retired, I saw way too many of my patients suffer needlessly from smoking, which remains the leading cause of preventable death in the United States. Here in South Dakota, 1,300 die each year from smoking, with nearly 30% of cancer deaths chalked up directly to Big Tobacco.

The Centers for Disease Control points out that “cigarette smoking harms nearly every organ of the body, causes many diseases and reduces the health of smokers in general.”

Heated tobacco products have been shown to contain more than 20 toxic chemicals, including many that can cause cancer. Nicotine use, regardless of form, is bad for your health, dangerous and addictive. This occurs with cigarettes, pipe tobacco, cigars, chewing tobacco, vaping and e-cigarettes.

And since none of this is new information, 60% of South Dakota voters approved Initiative 2 in 2006. It is a tax on tobacco products that has served the state well in many ways beyond the public health sphere:

• Increasing tobacco price has proven effective in keeping children from smoking and helping adults quit. Fewer South Dakota smokers means healthier South Dakotans and lower health care expenses. Still, each year $433 million in health care costs are directly attributable to smoking as well as $838.8 million in lost productivity via premature illness and death. Our people are our most important resource and tobacco kills those people. Beyond being a killer, tobacco is bad for business.
• Just in the past 10 years the tobacco tax has put more than $300 million toward the state general fund. The first $30 million each year is directed there and then every dollar after $35 million goes to support the state tax reduction fund, education enhancement fund and the healthcare trust fund.
• But about that $5 million tabbed for tobacco education and cessation programs: It supports programs designed to help tobacco users quit and keep kids from ever starting. The programs reduce the number of overall users and directly counteract the $24.9 million tobacco companies spend each year on marketing efforts in South Dakota alone.

This tax has not been increased in 18 years.

The proposal to reduce that amount to $2 million annually is a 60% reduction in the investment to keep our state clean of tobacco, but it’s worse than that. The state is already badly outspent in the battle for our next generation’s health and corporate tobacco needs no help reeling in our kids or killing our loved ones.

More than 16% of South Dakota high school students use tobacco products regularly, well more than the national average and higher than the state’s adult average of 14%. With reduced education and cessation investment, there is little doubt that both of those number will increase and corporate tobacco’s investment will serve it well in the form of significant profits at the expense of South Dakotans’ health.

Further, redirection of these needed funds is nothing short of abandoning our youth when there is a clear and present danger disguised in fruit flavors and slick marketing put forth by an opponent who certainly doesn’t care about deceptive tactics in its attempts to sustain its corporate profits.

South Dakota physicians have a duty to speak out on issues so clearly problematic to public health. South Dakota lawmakers have an obligation to do right by the future of this state. Keeping those funds in place is the right thing to do.

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Allen E Nord, MD, is past president of the South Dakota Tobacco-Free Kids Network and lives in Rapid City.