Put your money in your mouth, and smoke it

In these hard economic times, it seems like we are all trying to watch what we spend. As college students, perhaps we are feeling the trickle down of the economic burden that faces our parents, but as for right now, most of us do not face this burden ourselves (not until graduation at least!). I mean, it doesn't seem like many college kids can't go out on the weekends because they don't wanna spend money - not by the look of the line at Skeeps on Thursday nights - so obviously our alcohol budgets have not suffered too greatly. Another costly, yet also dirty habit, that many U of M students partake is cigarette smoking. I have not recently bought a pack myself, but cigarettes in Ann Arbor, especially on campus (Campus Corner loves to overcharge on cigarettes - from my personal experience) seem to run around $7 a pack. I come from Grosse Ile, MI, which is only 45 minutes away, and the cigarettes there are much cheaper, running around high $5 to $6 a pack.

So this gets me thinking: if you smoke a pack a day in the city of Ann Arbor @ $7 x 7 days in a week, that is roughly $49 a week spent on a dirty little habit. That is $196 a month and $2548 a year. I don't know about you, but I could think of a lot of things that I could buy for that much money.

Back when I used to smoke cigarettes, we will call it B.Q.C. (Before Quitting Cigarettes), I went to Florida with my friend Mara. I was amazed when I bought a pack of cigarettes and it was under $4 - cheap cigarettes and lots of sun, what isn't there to love about Florida? I also found this extremely strange because every time I got into the car I would hear an anti-smoking PSA. Now why would Florida launch this huge campaign to try to curtail smoking, but keep the prices of cigarettes so low? I was tempted to buy an entire carton and smuggle it back to Michigan in my suitcase. However, I did not - I could never get myself to buy a carton and admit that I smoked that many cigarettes, although I can assure you I probably did in the year or two that I smoked.

This got me thinking about cigarette tax rates. I personally believe that anti-smoking PSA's, especially the ones put out by the Truth campaign, are ineffective and sometimes laughable because they are just that ridiculous. What I do think is more effective, especially during these tough economic times - is hitting smokers where it really hurts - their pockets. According to TobaccoFreeKids.org, the state of Michigan is ranked the 11th highest state in terms of its state cigarette excise tax rate with $2.00 a pack. Florida is ranked 24th, with a tax rate of $1.339 per pack (perhaps cigarettes there are more expensive now, it was probably about two years ago when I bought cigarettes there). South Carolina is 51st with a tax rate of $0.07 a pack, and the highest state-local cigarette tax rate, at which I was not at all surprised, is in New York City:

"The highest combined state-local tax rate is $4.25 in New York City, with Chicago, IL second at $3.66 per pack."

This map shows the state cigarette tax rates in dollars as of May 2009.

Putting the tax rates into perspective, I decided to see if state smoking rates were reflective of their tax rates, which means that many of the southern states (Georgia, Alabama, the Carolinas) would have the highest amount of smokers. But looking at this map that shows the rate of smoking in each state, that seems to not be the case. The accompanying article from CNN.com is a good read, covering many of the topics I have looked at in this blog, such as celebrity smoking and smoking bans in public places. Here is a quote from the article I found particularly interesting:

"According to the CDC, about 43.4 million Americans (19.8 percent of the population) smoke."

also:

"According to the American Cancer Society, each day more than 3,500 people younger than 18 try their first cigarette, and 1,100 others become regular daily smokers."

So even though we are in recession and cigarette taxes are increasingly on the rise, it seems like many Americans are still not willing to give up their dirty little vice. Perhaps those who see it as a stress reliever see that $7 they pay for a pack as a tradeoff for the stress that smoking seems to keep at bay. Okay so maybe it doesn't seem too bad when you look at it that way, but is it worth $2548 each year to keep your stress down? Personally, I'd rather just go for a run to relieve my stress, which has the added benefit of being non-taxable AND non-cancerous.