ld88's Blog

The following is part of an article on the web today. It clearly states that governments collect more than $200 billion in tobacco taxes every year..... and people wonder why tobacco products are still around! Everyone wants to spend all of this money trying to prevent people from smoking or to help them quit, yet if we could just end the production of cigarettes, wouldn't that do the trick? Of course that can't happen because the government is making too much money to ever consider such a thing. How ridiculous! Spend more money to help people say "no" to something that is still being produced.... Someone PLEASE help me understand the logic behind this!

"NEW YORK - Tobacco use killed 100 million people worldwide in the 20th century and could kill 1 billion people in the 21st unless governments act now to dramatically reduce it, the World Health Organization said in a report Thursday.

Governments around the world collect more than $200 billion in tobacco taxes every year but spend less than one-fifth of 1 percent of that revenue on tobacco control, it said.

"We hold in our hands the solution to the global tobacco epidemic that threatens the lives of 1 billion men, women and children during this century," WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan said in an introduction to the report.

The WHO Report on the Global Tobacco Epidemic 2008 calls on all countries to dramatically increase efforts to prevent young people from beginning to smoke, help smokers quit and protect nonsmokers from exposure to second hand smoke.

It urges governments to adopt six "tobacco control policies" — raise taxes and prices of tobacco; ban tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship; protect people from second hand smoke; warn people about the dangers of tobacco; help those who want to quit smoking; and monitor tobacco use to understand and reverse the epidemic."