Florida Should Stop Surrendering to Big Tobacco and Start Protecting the Public Interest
By Lawton “Bud” Chiles
587 words
The greatest victory of my father’s political career was his 1997 landmark settlement victory over Big Tobacco. Against all odds, Gov. Lawton Chiles helped settle the score against this dangerous industry by bringing in a windfall worth $13 billion over the first 25 years to benefit the people of Florida.
The tobacco settlement included funds to curb tobacco use, and during the Chiles Administration, hundreds of millions of dollars were devoted to hitting back at Joe Camel and empowering teens through the Students Working Against Tobacco (SWAT) program. As a result, teen smoking dropped more than 20 percent during this period. SWAT later became a national model for the national TRUTH anti-smoking campaign.
Unfortunately, after my father left the scene, his successors bowed to pressure from the tobacco industry and dramatically cut smoking cessation budgets to as little as $1 million per year – about 5 cents per Floridian. Moreover, they dismantled the SWAT teen engagement efforts, and as a result, progress in curbing teen-smoking rates stalled. Florida’s leaders abandoned the needs of their people because of the lure of Big Tobacco’s money.
This year’s outrage is HB 5309, an unconscionable effort to further gut Florida’s smoking cessation efforts. For more than 10 years, Florida’s smoking-cessation program has been housed in the Florida Department of Health, creating partnerships between local public health agencies, advocacy groups, coalitions and the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.
HB 5309, however, would take this responsibility out of the hands of experienced DOH coordinators and instead move the program to the Department of Children and Families – the massive state agency that has zero experience administering a tobacco program and already has its hands full managing Florida’s foster care program.
Moreover, HB 5309 will transfer most of Florida’s tobacco control budget – $9 million out of $11 million – away from local community-based smoking-cessation partnerships.
Florida legislators would not have to raid the state’s smoking-cessation budget if they simply had the will to force all Florida cigarette companies to make payments to offset state Medicaid costs. Former Attorney General Bob Butterworth – who fought alongside Gov. Chiles to make Florida’s victory over Big Tobacco a reality – has said Florida could collect up to $70 million if it properly charged non-settling tobacco manufacturers. That revenue could reach nearly $200 million if the state applied those funds to Medicaid, which draws down federal matching funds. That would more than provide for Florida’s needs to fund an effective tobacco-control program, but Florida lawmakers have so far failed to act.
According to the U.S. CDC, Florida is already falling behind in making the investments it needs to run an effective community smoking cessation program. HB 5309 no doubt has Big Tobacco salivating over the opportunity to hook potentially millions of new Floridians on cigarettes by gutting Florida’s smoking cessation outreach model – which in the past has been a nationally recognized model of success – and instead taking Florida back to square one.
Florida cannot afford to continue down this dangerous path. If we refuse to invest in success, we will instead pay for failure. It will be Florida taxpayers who will bear this burden by paying their hard-earned tax dollars to fund Medicaid costs to treat sickness caused by Big Tobacco’s cigarettes.
Floridians deserve better, and we need to muster the leadership to reject HB 5309, to get SWAT going again, to adequately fund our community intervention programs and to make Florida a better place for ourselves and for our children.
Bud Chiles is president of the Lawton Chiles Foundation.
