Tobacco.org

• MARLOW: Is the CDC Blowing Smoke?  

CONCLUSIONS

Empirical evidence does not generally support the cdc claim that states that spend more on tobacco control deter more tobacco use than states that spend less. Contemporaneous spending on tobacco control is never found to exert an inverse effect on sales, and at times is found to exert a significant and positive effect on sales, contrary to the claims of the cdc. The true effect, however, appears to be zero based on current and past spending discounted at various rates. There is limited support for cdc claims regarding its recommendations on funding adequacy when this spending measure is discounted at rates of 5 and 10 percent, but not at rates of 15 and 20 percent. When significant, however, these effects arise at fairly low levels of confidence and with trivial effects on cigarette sales, and therefore suggest very cautious support for the cdc recommendations concerning adequacy. These conclusions are based on a battery of tests that consider various measures of contemporaneous and past spending and adequacy and are conducted over an eight-year period in which over $5 billion (in 2005 dollars), or roughly $18 per capita, was spent on tobacco control.

This study raises questions about the process by which the cdc determines its spending recommendations and whether the process is designed to reach a particular conclusion about tobacco control policy rather than to uncover policies that may best allocate resources toward controlling tobacco use. There may be a similarity to what I noted in a 2008 Econ Journal Watch paper on why the cdc and various researchers conclude that indoor smoking bans exert either positive or no adverse economic effects on restaurants and bars when, in fact, published studies demonstrate that numbers of businesses harmed are not zero. Factors include biases by governments and researchers that favor government solutions to perceived smoking problems, ample funding for researchers that conclude that bans exert no economic harm, simply ignoring industry funded research that indicates some degree of harm, and tacit agreement between many researchers to not openly scrutinize the quality of colleagues’ published research on this topic. It would be interesting to explore whether any of those factors might be influencing the policy process whereby the cdc makes spending recommendations regarding tobacco control. Those factors might also explain why the cdc is not compelled to demonstrate the effectiveness of its recommendations.

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