CDC ranks California 26th in tobacco control spending; Prop 29 would bring it up to 7th

Once upon a time, right after the voters saw through essentially the same campaign that Philip Morris and Reynolds ran in 1988 and passed Prop 99,  California had the largest most aggressive tobacco control program in the country.

According to a report in the MMWR released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, California is in the bottom half of states for tobacco control funding, spending only 17% of of what CDC recommends for a state its size, making it 26th in terms of investment in tobacco control.  (That is why, absent 29 passing, smoking will start increasing in California over the next few years.)

If Prop 29 passes, it would bring California up to 59% of what the CDC recommends, moving it up to 7th and empowering the state to rapidly reduce smoking again.  As I have stated before, we predict that the combined effects of the price increase that will follow Prop 29 and the reinvigorated tobacco control program, smoking would drop to 8.4% in 5 years with continuing smokers smoking even less than they do today, at which point the behavior might just collapse.