Smokescreen

You may be surprised to learn that Proposition 99, the initiative that would raise the tax on cigarettes and other tobacco products in California, is not the product of the Mafia, youth gangs or drug lords. It was written by a vast coalition of citizens deeply concerned about support for health care in the state. It would place California in the main-stream of states that appropriately tax tobacco.

The extraordinary radio and television advertising campaign being mounted by opponents of Proposition 99 with millions of dollars from the tobacco industry has sought to divert attention from the evident merits of the initiative to the imagined perils should it inspire increased smuggling of cigarettes from states with lower taxes.

That risk does exist. Recent smuggling from Indian reservation land in the state of Washington has shown that it can happen. But it has not proved to be a significant problem since a new federal law was voted a decade ago. There is not even a significant problem in the area of the greatest previous smuggling, on the East Coast where there is a 26-cent differential between the 2-cent tax in North Carolina and the 28-cent tax in New York City, according to federal law-enforcement officials. It seems particularly cynical for the tobacco industry to be deploring potential costs to law enforcement when it has resisted any adjustment in the tobacco tax to address the far greater public-health costs of smoking.

Under Proposition 99, the cigarette tax would go from 10 cents a package, one of the lowest in the nation, to 35 cents a package, one of the highest --but not the highest. At that level the tax would generate an estimated $600 million a year, to be divided by a fixed formula among such projects as hospital and physician services, health education and research. It would bring the Department of Health Services in Los Angeles County an estimated $41 million this year alone, helping to finance a desperately underfunded public-health program. It is hard to imagine a fairer way to spend the proceeds of a tax on a menace to public health.

The tobacco industry is of course free to present its views and opinions and to join the political struggle for what it considers its own interests.But the form and tone of its advertising campaign are, at best, a distortion. Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp has deplored the scare tactics and disputed the facts being used to sow fear. Unfortunately, the tobacco industry’s effort to portray the proposal as a threat to law and order was initially abetted by some law-enforcement officers who appear in the campaign commercials. It is significant, however, that the California Peace Officers Assn., after hearing the arguments of Van de Kamp and the findings of his Bureau of Organized Crime and Criminal Intelligence, dropped its opposition and adopted a neutral position.

Fortunately, California voters have long since learned to be discriminating in their response to political advertising. They will be quick to recognize the deception of the tobacco industry masquerading as Californians Against Unfair Tax Increases. They will grasp the reasons why the Coalition for a Healthy California qualified this useful and constructive initiative, and why it is in fact a fair tax increase. Fair, and much needed.