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The View From
Here
How Smoking Saves
Money
Posted Nov. 15,
2002
By James
Lacey
Media
Credit: Charles
Hazard/Insight
| | | Self-appointed watchdogs of
our health and well-being have approached the
elimination of tobacco from our daily lives with
crusading zeal. Continual efforts to ban smoking
in every public nook and cranny have forced
smokers to behave akin to medieval lepers. It
would be interesting to know the productivity cost
of smokers deserting their jobs to gather
furtively in dark corners beyond the reach of the
antismoking zealots. Thrown together with the
savings caused by smokers' pronounced tendency to
die off early (therefore no longer needing
expensive senior care), there probably is a decent
argument that society would realize a large fiscal
gain by encouraging
smoking.
However, this type of cost-benefit
analysis is not the strong suit of professional
zealots. So, it is no real wonder that they
completely missed the massive health costs that
increased tobacco taxes and huge settlements have
inflicted on the public they have sworn to save.
As every smoker or person even associated with a
smoker knows, when you quit smoking you gain
weight. Common sense makes the reason obvious and
we will not dwell on it now. What has not been
missing is the cost of this increased caloric
consumption.
A new study from the National
Bureau of Economic Research lays out some of the
costs of increasing tobacco prices. The zealots
have run smack into the law of unintended
consequences. According to the study, every 10
percent increase in the price of cigarettes leads
directly to a 2 percent rise in the number of
obese people. Between 1980 and 2001 the real price
of cigarettes increased 164 percent. In that same
period the number of obese people increased by 50
percent. Public-health professionals say privately
that this massive increase can be traced back to
the effects of higher cigarette prices, though
fast food and changed working habits also were
major contributors.
The problem is that the
health effects of obesity far outweigh the
negative effects of smoking. Two Rand researchers,
health economist Roland Sturm and psychiatrist
Kenneth Wells, examined the comparative effects of
obesity, smoking, heavy drinking and poverty on
chronic health conditions and health expenditures.
Their finding: Obesity is the most serious
problem. It is linked to a big increase in chronic
health conditions and significantly higher health
expenditures. And it affects more people than
smoking, heavy drinking or poverty.
Early
deaths caused by obesity already are well over
300,000 annually, and are growing. Obesity-related
health-care costs have grown to over $100 billion
a year and now consume over 6 percent of all
health-care spending.
Of course the zealots
have a ready answer for all of this: Just add a
little more social engineering and everything will
be okay. All we have to do now is take all the
smokers who no longer can afford their vice of
choice and force them to eat healthily. The great
legal tort machine, well funded by tobacco
settlements, already is gearing up for this new
effort.
Look for a lot more lawsuits filed
against McDonald's and Burger King as the zealots
try to make us all better people.
James
Lacey is a colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve and a
New York-based columnist with expertise in finance
and military affairs.
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