http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/024/metro/Jump_in_cigarette_sales_tied_to_Sept_11_attacks+.shtml

Jump in cigarette sales tied to Sept. 11 attacks

Surge in Mass. ends long steady decline

By Frank Phillips, Globe Staff, 1/24/2002

After nearly a decade of declines, cigarette sales jumped 13 percent in Massachusetts during the last three months of 2001 - a startling reversal that some specialists attribute to increased anxiety after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.

''The increase in tobacco use in Massachusetts is directly related to the events of September 11th,'' said Lori Fresina, a Cancer Society spokeswoman. ''That is the only explanation for a spike of that significance.''

Before the jump, cigarette sales in the state had dropped steadily since 1993. That year, the state implemented a $48 million-a-year tobacco education program that is funded by a voter-approved, 25 cent-per-pack tax and with money from the 1998 US tobacco industry settlement with the states.

The recent jump in cigarette sales is the biggest quarterly increase ever.

Joan Hansen, the director of a tobacco treatment program at Manet Community Health Center in Quincy, said she has seen a sudden influx of smokers recently - many of whom had been through her program before, but relapsed after the Sept. 11 attacks.

''September 11th absolutely made a big difference,'' Hansen said. ''People are feeling more precarious, less safe. They are more concerned about going for a walk, going shopping. They are concerned about an awful lot of things and it has triggered a need to smoke.''

The post-attacks increase is in sharp contrast to the period between 1993 and 1999, when the percentage of smokers in Massachusetts dropped from 22.6 to 20.9 percent - or 80,000 fewer smokers. During that time, the average number of cigarettes smoked per day by adults declined nearly 20 percent. Youth smoking also dropped at a faster rate in Massachusetts than in other states.

The same trend is appearing across the country. A national survey done in October for the drug firm GlaxoSmithKline and the American Cancer Society found that smokers increased their cigarette use by 75 percent after the attacks, anthrax scares, and security crackdown.

The same study showed that 19 percent of those who had quit relapsed, and another 6 percent took up smoking for the first time.

The poll of 2,018 adults was done for the Great American SmokeOut event and has not been officially released.

This week, using special emergency powers, Acting Governor Jane Swift unilaterally cut $17 million from this year's Tobacco Control Program budget and is proposing a $29 million reduction in the fiscal 2003 budget. It will reduce spending on tobacco control by two-thirds.

Swift yesterday argued that she had to make a number of tough choices, including the cuts to the antismoking campaign, in order to balance the proposed $23.5 billion budget that she submitted to the Legislature.

''I think that our tobacco control programs have been very successful,'' Swift said. ''I think they've been a very worthy investment, but I think it's something that we can forgo in these very difficult times to protect other important health care services.''

Swift denied that she was violating the voters' will by diverting most of the revenue from the 25-cent cigarette tax, approved by voters in 1992, to health programs unrelated to smoking. Swift has said she would oppose the rollback of the state income tax rate because it would violate the will of the voters who approved the cut in a 2000 ballot question.

''If you look at it, smoking cessation was one of a whole list of programs that were envisioned'' to be funded by the 1992 ballot question, Swift said yesterday.

Smoking foes who drew up that 1992 ballot petition and fought the public campaign for it yesterday rejected Swift's take on what that ballot question entailed. ''It is absolutely clear that voters were approving a law that spells out that [money from the cigarette tax increase] is to fund a comprehensive antismoking program,'' said Fresina, whose group led the health coalition that helped pass the referendum.

-- Anonymous, January 24, 2002