It makes sense. Cigarettes cost the state of Florida about $6 billion a year in exorbitant health care costs associated with smoking - heart disease, cancers and hospitalizations, according to the Alliance for Healthy Florida Campaign.

Productivity on the job decreases among smokers too. This creates a financial deficit for all Floridians.

Nationally, the CDC estimates smoking-related illnesscosts all Americans more than $75 billion a year. About 14 percent of all Medicaid expenses are for smoking-related illness. Since cigarette sales contribute the bulk of the state’s tobacco tax income – increasing the tax may offset some of the burden of cigarettes and smoking.
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FRANKFORT, Ky. — Indiana’s health commissioner told Kentucky lawmakers yesterday that they should strongly consider increasing the state cigarette tax — as her state did last year.

Dr. Judith Monroe said higher taxation is the most effective way to discourage smoking, especially among youths, and reduce health costs associated with cigarettes.

“As the price goes up, youth smoking goes down,” said Monroe, testifying before the joint House-Senate Health and Welfare Committee.
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By Wendy Koch, USA TODAY
A pink “purse pack” of skinny cigarettes has health groups demanding that Philip Morris USA withdraw the new product.

Virginia Slims Superslims Lights, which come in a lipstick-size pack of 20 cigarettes, are “clearly designed to appeal to teen girls,” says Cheryl Healton of the American Legacy Foundation, an anti-smoking group.

She and two dozen other health and women’s groups, including the American Cancer Society, sent Philip Morris a letter this week demanding the product’s removal from the market. They said smoking endangers women’s health and does not empower them as suggested by the longtime Virginia Slims tagline, “You’ve come a long way, baby.”
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Labeling the Poospatuck Indian reservation a “tax evasion haven,” New York City’s lead attorney in a lawsuit against smoke shops on the Mastic reservation yesterday estimated that Suffolk is losing $21 million in local sales tax revenue to illegal bootlegging.

Eric Proshansky, a deputy city corporation counsel made the estimate before county lawmakers approved a resolution directing the county attorney to piggyback onto the city lawsuit against the reservation’s seven smoke shops.

The vote, came despite a statement from Harry Wallace, the chief of the Unkechaug tribe, asking lawmakers not to join the city suit claiming the tribe is being made “a scapegoat for the state economic ills.”

Proshansky and Edward Helig, chief of the Suffolk district attorney’s economic crimes unit, said nearly 10 million cartons of untaxed cigarettes are illegally sold at the reservation without charging state city and county taxes. The law only allows tax-free cigarettes to be sold to the 279 tribal members living on the reservation, not outsiders.

LOUISVILLE, KY (WAVE) By Shayla Reaves - New projections out this week shows Kentucky is facing a $450-million shortfall this fiscal year. It is a financial mess that has Kentucky leaders looking at a cigarette tax to help dig us out of that hole. WAVE 3’s Shayla Reaves asked a former U.S. Surgeon General to weigh in.

It has been nearly 14 years since Joycelyn Elders served as Surgeon General of the United States. Still, the former Clinton-era appointee and doctor supports higher cigarette taxes, just not how states sometimes use them.

“They haven’t used it for health for the most part, they’ve used it to help the whole state budget,” Elders said. “If we’re going to increase the cigarette tax, we need to use it for health.”

According to Elders, increasing the cigarette tax 10 cents would reduce the number of young people who start smoking by one percent.

This week, Indiana’s State Department of health released its findings about an increase there. Since upping the tax from 44 cents to 99 cents last July, officials say they have seen a 20 percent drop in the number of people who smoke. At 30 cents a pack, Kentucky has one of the lowest cigarette taxes in the nation.

“90 percent of the young people, old people who smoke all people who smoke start smoking before age 19,” said Elders. “Making it less affordable makes fewer young people start and that is certainly what we want to do.”

Elders says cigarette tax money should go towards prevention, education and treatment, not to “help the whole state’s budget”.

“Cigarettes cause lung cancer, we need to use it to help Medicaid pay for taking care of poor people who have lung cancer,” said the former Surgeon General.

Still, raising taxes on cigarettes in a tobacco-growing state like Kentucky is difficult.

“This is a tobacco-growing state and realizing that it will affect tobacco farmers and the tobacco industry. It is also very costly and costly in terms of people’s lives,” Elders told WAVE 3 News.