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The State, Opinion: The end of an era

June 30, 2010

TODAY MARKS the end of a shameful era in South Carolina. An era in which deep-pocketed special interests and extremist ideology trumped the lives and health of children and the best interests of taxpayers.

This is the last day (at least for the foreseeable future) that South Carolina claims the distinction as the state that does the most to help the cigarette industry addict children.

It’s the last day South Carolina claims the distinction as the state that hands the taxpayers the biggest bill for the medical expenses of the addicts it helped to create.

This is the last day we will charge an embarrassingly low tax of 7 cents per pack of cigarettes — by far the lowest in the nation. On Thursday, our tax goes to 57 cents, which will rank 42nd nationally, and South Carolina joins the 46 other states that have raised their cigarette taxes since 2002.

Now normally, a tax increase would not be cause for celebration. Although there are times when raising a tax is necessary, it’s generally not a good thing; at best it’s merely the only responsible option.

But the cigarette tax is not a normal tax, because cigarettes are not a normal product.

Cigarettes are implements of death. And unlike other implements of death, they have no beneficial qualities: They can’t be used for self-defense, as guns can; they can’t be used to provide transportation, as automobiles can. They simply kill. Slowly. Painfully. Expensively. (Yes, there are some medical benefits to nicotine; those can be gotten without the deadly delivery system that has enriched cigarette companies for generations.)

What makes cigarettes so insidious is the fact that manufacturers manipulate the level of nicotine in order to make them as addictive as possible. And that, as many people enslaved to what some call the most addictive substance on the planet, means that the only sure way to save yourself from a life of addiction is to never take that first puff.

It’s easy for adults to weigh the dangers of smoking, think of friends and relatives who have died hideously painful deaths as a result of their addictions, and make the rational decision not to start smoking. It’s another thing to expect the invincible adolescent to make that decision.

What raising the cigarette tax does is use the inescapable facts of economics to make it a little more difficult for the invincible adolescent to take that first puff. Not only does this make sense — the more a product costs, the less likely someone is to try it for the first time — but it has been documented to work, in study after study: A 10 percent increase in the cost of cigarettes results in a 7 percent decline in the number of minors who smoke. As an added bonus, adult smoking drops off by more than 2 percent.

That means nearly 400 kids in our state who would have become addicts next year will not. It means that 23,000 children alive today will not ever become smokers — and that 13,000 adult smokers will quit.

Like alcohol taxes, the cigarette tax it is what we used to call a sin tax, because it targets those who engage in what have traditionally been considered sinful behavior. We agree that smoking is stupid, but what’s truly sinful is how long it took us to raise this life-saving tax.

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