Smoking :: U.S. Progress in Reducing Smoking At Risk

The annual report, which assesses whether states are keeping their promise to use proceeds from the 1998 state tobacco settlement to fund tobacco prevention and cessation programs, finds that only three states — Maine, Delaware and Colorado — currently fund tobacco prevention programs at minimum levels recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Other findings include:

— Only 14 other states fund tobacco prevention programs at even half the CDC’s minimum amount.

— Twenty-eight states and the District of Columbia are spending less than half the CDC minimum, while five states — Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire and Tennessee — spend no significant state funds on tobacco prevention.

— The total amount the states are spending on tobacco prevention in the current budget year — $595.4 million — is just 37 percent of the $1.6 billion minimum the CDC recommends. It is just 2.7 percent of the record $21.7 billion in tobacco- generated revenue the states will collect this year from the tobacco settlement and tobacco taxes.

— Mississippi, which for the past eight years has funded a highly successful tobacco prevention program at CDC-recommended levels, this year has dropped to last among the states because Governor Haley Barbour, a former tobacco lobbyist, has worked to eliminate funding for the program.

The report, “A Broken Promise to Our Children: The 1998 State Tobacco Settlement Eight Years Later,” was released by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, American Heart Association, American Cancer Society and American Lung Association.

The report comes as the CDC’s most recent surveys have found that the nation’s progress in reducing smoking has stalled among both youth and adults.

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