Higher tobacco tax proposed

“The single most effective thing California could do is to increase the tobacco tax,” McGoldrick said. A proposal to raise the tobacco tax in California by $2 per pack of cigarettes passed the Senate committee on health as well as the committee on governance and finance on Wednesday and is heading to appropriations. Senator Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, who introduced the bill, SB 768, said the $1.5 billion raised from the tobacco tax each year would help pay for state spending on tobacco-related medical care, education and law enforcement.

Los Angeles high school student smoking rates, 1997-2011. Source: CDC – Youth Risk Behavior Survey.

Another key element in tobacco control is to reverse the idea that smoking is a hip, sophisticated and rebellious activity. But that effort has become more difficult, in part because smoking by actors is on the rise in movies, according to a 2012 UCSF study. Research has found that 44% of adolescents who start smoking do so because of smoking images they have seen in the movies, according to Legacy, a Washington-based nonprofit established as part of the Master Settlement Agreement to educate the public.

Evidence of the continued allure of smoking for middle and high school students appeared in the CDC study, which found that more than 20 percent of those who have never smoked reported being “open” to trying smoking in the next year, said Shanta R. Dube, a CDC researcher and the lead author of the new study, “Pro-Tobacco Influences and Susceptibility to Smoking Cigarettes Among Middle and High School Students – United States 2011,” published in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
Even more troubling is that the percentage of students “open” to smoking has stayed the same, year after year, since 2000, Dube noted. And advertising plays a role in keeping that allure going.
“Middle school students who reported seeing tobacco ads in all three venues – stores, magazines and on the Internet – were two to three times more likely to say there were open to smoking in the next year than students who reported seeing no advertisements,” Dube said.