Investment: $1.8 billion, ROI in 15 years: $86 billion...
Seema Singh -
Tuesday, August 26, 2008 5:00 AM
Yes, that's the trade-off California state government pulled off in its tobacco control program which ended in 2004.
In a first ever study to quantifiably connect tobacco control to healthcare savings, published in today's issue of PLoS Medicine, researchers say California state government made a 50-to-1 return on its investment in tobacco control.
The program prevented 3.6 billion packs of cigarettes, worth $9.2 billion, from being smoked between 1989 and 2004. The benefits are conspicuously large because the program was targeted at adults, not youth.
"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," says the lead author Stanton Glantz, director of the University of California San Francisco Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education.
The findings are eye-opening, and should be particularly significant for India where smoking-related diseases and deaths are assuming epidemic proportions. Mint carried a report in February.
Modified and stricter smoking ban will come into effect in India from Oct 2 and it's anticipated that many smokers would quit smoking just as they did after a similar ban in the UK according to a new BBC report.
But surely new policy intervention is needed as strikingly new demographics have emerged -- women are as much at risk as men, both in rural and urban India.