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The poor will continue disproportionately to smoke - for rational reasons. It's perverse for the poverty industry not to acknowledge it
Jump to full article: Globe and Mail (ca), 2009-12-18
Author: Neil Reynolds
Intro: Ontario's "deprivation index" uses 10 benchmarks to measure poverty, among them such necessities of life as possession of a working toaster. So far, so good. Inexplicably, however, it omits a weekly carton of cigarettes. . . .
Pressed by high cigarette prices, the poor are more apt to swap their vegetable ration for a pack of smokes. And statistics also show that poor people who quit are most apt to put on weight, grow obese - and add diabetes to the myriad handicaps that make their lives difficult.
In a comprehensive 2004 report on the relationship between poverty and smoking, a team of World Bank scholars determined that material deprivation - measured as not having enough money for food or fuel - is everywhere associated with smoking. Poverty, in other words, is a reliable predictor of smoking.
The poorer the country, the more pervasive the habit. . . .
Tobacco taxes are poverty taxes. Fifty cartons of cigarettes a year, purchased in Ontario, costs around $3,750 - an onerous expense for a smoker whose income is, say, $15,000 a year. In the United States, smoking-rights crusader Michael J. McFadden has accurately defined tobacco taxes (in his book Dissecting AntiSmokers' Brains) as a tax "on the millions of people who live in the bottom quintile."
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