California Stop-Smoking Campaign Saved $86 Billion: Report

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CHICAGO (Reuters) - California's large-scale tobacco control campaign has saved $86 billion in health care costs in its first 15 years, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

Revenues generated from the 1998 voter-approved anti-smoking Proposition 10, which added a...

Revenues generated from the 1998 voter-approved anti-smoking Proposition 10, which added a 50-cent-tax on tobacco products, helped fund anti-smoking programs such as the billboard displayed. One year after California joined 45 other states in reaching a settlement with tobacco companies, the state received $315 million as the first payment in the agreement. Anti-smoking activists say California has long been a leader in anti-tobacco legislation.

(AP Photo/Calif., Dept. of Health Services.)

The $86 billion reduction in health costs, based on 2004 dollars, represents about a 50-fold return on the $1.8 billion California spent on the program, they said.

"The benefits of the program accrued very quickly and are very large," Stanton Glantz, director of the University of California San Francisco Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, said in a statement.

Unlike many programs which center on teens, the California program focuses its tobacco-control efforts on adults through an aggressive media campaign and changes in public policy, such as promoting smoke-free environments.

"When adults stop smoking, you see immediate benefits in heart disease, with impacts on cancer and lung diseases starting to appear a year or two later," said Glantz, whose findings appear in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine.

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According to the study, the program prevented the sale of 3.6 billion packs of cigarettes -- worth $9.2 billion to the tobacco industry -- between 1989 and 2004.

The report may help persuade states to step up funding for such large-scale efforts to counteract the tobacco industry's $13 billion annual spending on smoking-related advertising and promotions.

A report by the National Cancer Institute last week found such advertising increases tobacco use. But it also found that large-scale tobacco control campaigns work, and called for more funding of such efforts.

Tobacco accounts for one in 10 adult deaths worldwide and is the leading preventable cause of death in the world, according to the World Health Organization. In the United States, smoking kills more than 400,000 people prematurely each year.

To study the effects of California's program, Glantz and colleagues used statistical models that looked at the relationships between per capita spending on cigarettes and health costs between 1980 and 2004.