Up in smoke

Indiana gets millions every year from the "master settlement" with tobacco companies reached in 1998 -- more than $600 million this year alone. In fact, it will have gotten billions over the 30-year course of the settlement. Yet it keeps cutting the paltry funding for tobacco cessation programs:

 Indiana has the second highest percentage of smokers in the nation, yet the state cut funding this year for tobacco prevention programs by 28 percent. Those are the findings in a national report released Wednesday titled: A Broken Promise to our Children: The 1998 State Tobacco Settlement 11 Years Later .

[. . .]

"The CDC recommends that Indiana would spend just short of $79 million for a really effective tobacco control program," said Melissa Lewis, of the Indiana Academy of Family Physicians.

Indiana spends $10.8 million a year on its tobacco control program. Democratic state legislator Bill Crawford believes that's not enough. But he says political ploys control the purse strings.

I'm not sure how much I embrace the notion that the state should identify problem behavior, then take our money to fund programs to keep us from engaging in it. I doubt the ability of the state to persuade young people not to smoke. I wonder how the CDC came up with the "right" amount of money that should be spent.

But, all that aisde, the states sued the tobacco companies in order to get back the Medicaid money they had to spend on smoking-related illness, so that should have been billions poured into health programs. But, of course, states have merely used the settlement as a big slush fund. It's just more money to spend.

So those states -- Indiana included -- were just involved in a shady little shakedown. Every cent not spent on smoking-related or other health issues should be considered an immoral act, if not a criminal one.