FUNDS DECLINE HITS ANTI-SMOKE DRIVE

FUNDING for national anti-smoking campaigns is at an historic low, a
study has shown.

Associate professor Simon Chapman, of the University of Sydney's
department of public health and community medicine, said it was
popular for Australian governments to be tough on illicit drugs but
they had been decidedly weak on tobacco.

"They have allowed smoking prevalence to languish unchanged in the
1990s after having successfully driven it down during the preceding
three decades," Professor Chapman says in the Medical Journal of Australia.

"A small gain has been that several State governments have announced
or have implemented bans on smoking in restaurants but, relative to
government funding of other public health issues, funding for tobacco
control is appallingly neglected."

But a spokeswoman for Federal Health Minister Michael Wooldridge said
a report on the Government's three-year-old Every Cigarette is Doing
You Damage campaign showed it was highly successful.

"It actually led to a 2 per cent drop in the smoking population," she
said. "That advertising campaign is being copied across the world."

The evaluation had found that in the first six months of the campaign,
an estimated $24 million in health expenditure on smoking-related
illness was averted.

The latest phase of the campaign, showing the effect of smoking on a
healthy lung and on the damage tobacco causes to the eyes, started
last month.

Professor Chapman's study showed that average annual expenditure by
the Federal Government between 1994-95 to 2002-03 on illicit drug
strategies was $74.7 million, compared with $8.1 million on tobacco
campaigns.

The 1998 death rate from illicit drug use was 630 compared with 18,224
from smoking-related illnesses.

Professor Chapman said the Government had failed to commit to smoking
prevention strategies any money from its $400 million windfall from
changes to tobacco tax.

Over the coming two years the Government was likely to derive at least
a thousand times more from tobacco excise than it committed to tobacco
harm minimisation in its 1998-99 Budget.

His article prompted the Australian Cancer Foundation to call for a
tenfold increase in funding for tobacco control to stop the rise in
deaths and diseases caused by smoking.

In WA, a joint advertising campaign between the WA Cancer Foundation
and WA Health Department started at the weekend.