Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, September 27, 1993                   TAG: 9403170012
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

A TAX TO MAKE YOU FEEL GOOD

That's right, soak the smokers. It's for their own good, as well as the common good.

In an article that appeared on this newspaper's Commentary page last week, Koop backed up his arguments for a high cigarette tax with some compelling numbers. Shelling out an additional $2 for every pack of cigarettes is a lot to pay to suck nicotine into the lungs, but it's nothing compared to the price that tobacco already is extracting from society in the form of:

400,000 deaths each year.

$68 billion (that's no typo; billion dollars) each year in health-care costs and lost productivity.

So what would a heavy tax do besides make smokers, who already are complaining that they feel like social outcasts, feel like tax martyrs, as well?

It just might make some of them quit. And if it doesn't, it will provide partial payment, at least, on the medical bill that tobacco racks up. It will also help pay for the extension of health-insurance coverage to Americans who now lack it.

Most important, it would help keep some young people from ever taking up the smoking habit. If you doubt this, look at the numbers from Canada: Since it raised cigarette taxes to more than $3 per pack, the smoking rate among youths has dropped by 60 percent.

Between those who would quit and those who would never start, experts guess that a $2-a-pack tax increase on cigarettes in the United States would cause about 7.6 million Americans to choose not to smoke.

Think of the health-care savings from that alone.

Such a decline in the number of smokers would have economic repercussions, of course. Smokers support an entire industry as they puff their way to early graves. Thus, the tobacco industry offers some grave figures of its own, projecting the loss of nearly 82,000 jobs nationwide if a sizable cigarette tax is enacted. It estimates that more than 7,500 tobacco-sector jobs would be lost in Virginia alone.

If those figures proved to be accurate, that would be a blow at a time when there are none too many jobs to be found. Sorry about that.

On the other hand, in 1991 - that is, in one year alone, according to one study - 9,090 Virginians died as a result of smoke-related diseases. That's worse than losing a job.

Small farmers in Virginia and elsewhere already are trying to diversify and break their dependence on tobacco as a cash crop. Folks all along the tobacco chain would be wise to follow their example, accept the well-established fact that smoking is addictive and deadly, and recognize that society must do what it can to discourage the habit no matter what the cost in jobs.

As for the consumer, the poor guy who got hooked when he or she was young and took good health for granted, our sympathies. Any tax is a bitter pill to swallow. But in the long run, a tobacco tax would be good medicine. Smokers prompted to quit would agree, one day, that while it didn't taste good going down, it sure made them feel a whole lot better afterwards.