Smoking rates in Bartholomew County are dropping, but Indiana’s statewide rate continues to be a costly challenge to Hoosiers’ health, quality of life and community economic development.
In Indiana, 21 percent of Hoosiers are smokers, ranking the state as 41st in the nation, according to the Alliance for a Healthier Indiana, which presented a Sept. 11 Town Hall Road Show to raise awareness about Indiana’s health rankings.
Locally, Bartholomew County has a lower percentage of smokers than statewide, with about 15 percent of adults who smoke, according to Columbus Regional Hospital statistics. That’s down 11 percentage points, from about 26 percent in 1996.
Teen smoking rates in Bartholomew County are also dropping, said Beth Morris, director of Community Health Partnerships for Columbus Regional Health.
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An Indiana Youth Institute survey, which asks teens whether they have smoked within the past 30 years, shows the county’s rate of young smokers has declined dramatically.
“But vaping is another story,” Morris said of an increasing number of teens statewide who are testing out a different way to be introduced to smoking.
Vaping is the act of inhaling and exhaling an aerosol, often referred to as vapor, produced by an e-cigarette. The e-liquid in vaporizer products usually contains a propylene glycol or vegetable glycerin-based liquid with nicotine, flavoring and other chemicals and metals, but not tobacco.
Cost of smoking
Alliance representatives say smoking affects every Hoosier, whether they smoke or not.
Tobacco costs Indiana $5.4 billion annually for spending on health care and in lost worker productivity, and secondhand smoke costs the state $2.2 billion in excess medical expenses and premature loss of life, the alliance says.
Each Indiana household pays $1,125 in taxes to cover smoking-related expenses, whether they smoke or not, the alliance said.
Employees who smoke spend an average of three weeks per year, or about a half hour each day, taking smoke breaks, the alliance states.
While such statistics got the attention of the audience, Dr. Cynthia Meneghini, a physician with Community Health Network in Indianapolis, put the damage in more personal terms.
When her father began smoking in the 1960s, cigarette advertisements included photos of physicians smoking with a claim, “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.”
Meneghini chronicled her father’s death from lung cancer, attributed to a lifetime of smoking. She described the cancer treatment and the expense for radiation and chemotherapy he endured, which could not save him.
“Smoking is responsible for 87 percent of all lung cancer,” she said.
The average cost for treating an end-stage patient with incurable cancer is more than $256,000 a year, she said, saying treatment for smoking-related illnesses cost $7 billion in Indiana each year, and an estimated $600 million in Medicaid costs.
Her father eventually went into hospice and died in August 2016.
“I share his story because I couldn’t help him,” she said. “But I can help Hoosiers stop smoking.”
One of the current battlefields against tobacco is to identify and attack the marketing tactics of the tobacco companies, which are spending a lot of their marketing dollars on point-of-sale advertising to encourage people to smoke, said Kylee Jones, Tobacco Awareness Coordinator for Healthy Communities.
When Bartholomew County was surveyed as to where tobacco products were being marketed, the largest proportion of stores carrying tobacco were convenience stores, Jones said.
A targeted effort to lure youth to try smoking includes products in fruit flavors such as candy cigarettes with Spiderman, Flintstones and other cartoon character packaging and baseball-related chewing gum packaged to look like chewing tobacco, specifically targeted toward young people, Jones said.
In the local survey, 93 percent of retailers who carried tobacco also had these products on store shelves, she said.
In addition to flavored products, many other items targeted to youth are placed lower on the shelves, at eye level for children, Jones said.
Legislative push
The alliance has created a four-part plan asking state legislators to step up and enact changes that will make it less convenient and more expensive to be a smoker in Indiana.
The plan includes:
Increasing Indiana’s current 99.5 cent per pack tax by $1.50 per pack. The alliance says this will reduce the number of youth who smoke by 6 to 7 percent and result in $1.4 billion in long-term health care savings, while adding $200 million in new revenue to be used to boost Indiana’s smoking-cessation efforts.
Restoring the state’s funding for prevention and smoking cessation to 2001 levels, a $35 million commitment, which would put Indiana in the top 10 states for prevention and tobacco-control programs in the nation.
Raising the minimum age for tobacco sales from 18 to 21, which would be a huge deterrent for potential new smokers, the alliance says. More than 4,100 Hoosiers under the age of 18 becoming new daily smokers each year, according to the alliance. An estimated 95 percent of adult smokers start before age 21.
Repealing the 1991 law that created special treatment for smokers, and allow employers to effectively manage rising health care costs. Employees who smoke result in increased health care costs and higher life insurance premiums for all employees, according to the alliance.
The alliance provided stamped postcards that town hall participants could send to their legislators asking the lawmakers to increase the sales tax on tobacco.
“We have to decrease smoking rates in the United States to decrease health care costs,” Meneghini said. “Our main goal is to save lives.”
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To learn more about the State of Our Health 2018 Town Hall Road Show, visit HealthierIndiana.org.
Upcoming road shows are planned Oct. 11 in Madison and Oct. 12 in Sellersburg.
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Indiana ranks 38th among the nation’s 50 states in overall health, according to America’s Health Rankings 2017 Annual Report.
Indiana’s other rankings include:
- 34th worst in drug deaths
- 40th worst in obesity
- 41st worst in percentage of smokers
- 42nd worst in infant mortality
- 49th worst in public health funding
Source: Alliance for a Healthier Indiana
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To obtain information about how to quit smoking, visit Healthy Communities tobacco awareness website at:
crh.org/community-foundation/healthy-communities/tobacco-awareness
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