HOOKED ON TOBACCO MONEY

TALK about being addicted!

President Clinton's good news budget and extended plans for the fiscal
future count upon a serious jolt of dough from the tobacco industry.
Excellent. Let the polluters pay for some of their poisoning.

Clinton anticipates $65 billion in dirty lung money over the next few
years. This increase in tobacco taxes is within the framework of the
proposed $368.5 billion tobacco settlement.

Wonderful.

From this will come funding for schools, health insurance for the poor,
child care, child development, anti-smoking and anti-tobacco use programs
at state and federal levels.

High fives all around. But where do we expect that money to come from?

From people smoking. Smoking more, presumably. To mitigate the terrible
effects of smoking we need people to smoke more.

It's like needing to start a fire so that you can have a fire sale to pay
for the fire engine which you need to put out the fire.

We are hooked.

There are a lot of good deeds likely to stem from the flow of serious money
from the tobacco companies as they bargain their way through state
complaints at having to clean up after them. Yet there is more than a
little irony that the state and federal budgets deep into the future will
be so interwoven with considerations of smoking care and smoking revenues.
It is an unhealthy interdependence, this dependence for health care on the
ones causing the need for health care in the first place. And the second
place, and every place as far as one can count.

Further, at another sad level, it can be seen that the state has an
aggressive interest -- even an investment -- in the tobacco
companies'continuing prosperity.

Surely, this is a unique situation, this Catch-22 circling around tobacco's
grisly contribution. In Connecticut and elsewhere, the state budget is
hooked on gambling -- casinos and lotteries -- but for all its hard human
ramifications, gambling doesn't begin to cost the government what it brings
in. There are much larger issues of morality and principle, largely
brushed under the rug, about the state's addiction to gambling revenues
but, for better or worse, it makes something of a profit in a devil's
exchange.

Alcohol, a far greater problem, stuns the society and saps its energy,
kills, maims, destroys. Families are wrecked, careers shattered, fortunes
blighted. It also diverts a huge administrative sum, eased modestly by
alcohol taxes. The social cost is enormous, direct and indirect.

But tobacco is alone in creating its own mad swirl where cause and effect
blur into one another, where supply and demand overlap, where tobacco
manufactures the pain and, in manufacturing even more, supplies some small
portion of the money to assist in easing the cost of bearing that pain.

It seems insane. It is.

And, at that, it is a lot better this way than any way it's been so far. We
are spared some of the outrageous lies with which the industry cruelly
sought to deflect responsibility for its addictive product and its ghoulish
promotion when they would encourage us to smoke for their pure profit. Now
the macabre strategy might even be to encourage us to smoke so that they
can make enough to pay their bills over our smoking. There is logic in
there somewhere.