New York’s kicking butts

Smokers with low incomes who continue to spend on cigarettes, despite NY’s high taxes. The “Great Cigarette-Tax Lie” (Patrick Basham and John Luik, PostOpinion, Oct. 8) promotes a novel idea: Cut taxes on cigarettes to take the financial burden off of lower-income people. Then, when they get sick, we can hospitalize them on the public’s dime. Maybe we should approve butts through food stamps, too.

Cigarette taxes have helped to address big- picture problems in a significant way, like reducing smoking rates. New York has reduced adult smoking rates to 14 percent . Big Tobacco spends millions of dollars on manipulative marketing in New York every day, and low-income communities are heavily targeted. These communities also have less access to continual cessation resources.

It’s not easy to quit, and even harder if you’re being treated in sporadic intervals. New York is able to find such success in reducing smoking rates because of the state’s comprehensive and effective cessation strategies, of which taxes are only one.