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Tobacco Tax Increase - Hike in Purchasing Cigarettes Could Lead to Quitting
On a recent study that was conducted, results showed that pushing tobacco taxes higher can possibly reduce smoking in individuals with mental, alcohol, and drug disorders. If this has an effect on how smokers are purchasing their cigarettes, how will the tobacco industry look to counter the increase in tax? Are looking at a small cost reduction on cigarettes coming soon, or will the industry push an aggressive advertising campaign to make up for its losses? It’s an interesting take on this situation since the study, which was conducted at the Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA presented that by increasing the taxes on cigarettes by 10 percent lead to a drop in purchasing them by 18.2 percent. Now if 18.2 percent is an actual number of which we can go by, then let’s do some calculations. There are an estimated 23 million men that smoke in the United States and approximately 21 million women. This is somewhere in the range of 44 million smokers combined. 18 percent of that number amounts to… 7,920,000 million smokers and that is an exponential number if close to 8 million people stop purchasing cigarettes. According to the study by Dr. Michael Ong of the Geffen School of Medicine, increasing the tax rates on cigarettes would be a way of scaling down smoking which is still the leading preventable cause of death in the United States. A research similar to this one had been conducted during the early years of the 90’s. At the time, the research had shown that not many would be willing to quit smoking if there was to be an increase in cost for cigarettes. However, research had not included subjects with alcohol and drug abuse. This is strictly based upon 7,530 individuals and from that group 43.8 percent were smokers. What the research had found was that people who were binge drinkers, who suffered from mental disorders and people who were drug substance abusers were all very likely to quit smoking with an increase in cost. How much of an impact can this have down the road? That is still to be seen, another research would have to be conducted to see how much smoking would be reduced over the long term for each categorized individual. Taxes may have to be increased substantially on cigarettes to increase the percentage of quitters not only for the short term, but for the long term as well. Actual study posted at the American Journal of Public Health. (ANI)
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