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• BASHAM: Up in smoke  

Two recent events underscore big problems with the way society tries to fight tobacco use.

First, a new Harvard study came out alleging that the tobacco industry manipulated menthol levels in cigarettes to hook young smokers in violation of the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement, which bans tobacco companies from targeting youths. And second, billionaires Michael R. Bloomberg and Bill Gates last week threw their support behind a new $500 million worldwide effort to stop smoking.

Whatever the tobacco companies may have done with menthol levels, the bigger scandal is how states have misspent the billions paid to them by the tobacco industry. And however well-intentioned, the Gates-Bloomberg effort, which involves the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, is likely to fail because the tobacco control programs that it will fund - featuring such things as higher taxes, smoking bans and advertising restrictions - have failed before. These multiple shortcomings point to the need for a new, more effective approach to handling, and funding, tobacco prevention. . . .

Ten years and $53 billion after the tobacco settlement windfall, there is precious little to show in terms of credible smoking prevention. It's time for Congress - and perhaps the president - to step in and demand that the states live up to their promise to use the settlement money for effective tobacco prevention. To ensure the settlement money has an impact, it needs to be diverted from projects unrelated to smoking and then placed into interventions that are based on what the best evidence shows are the real reasons kids start using cigarettes.

Until that happens, anti-tobacco efforts - whether funded by the states or by well-intentioned billionaires - will continue to amount to little more than blowing smoke.

--Patrick Basham teaches tobacco regulation at the Johns Hopkins University, directs the Democracy Institute and is a Cato Institute adjunct scholar.

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