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BROWN AND WILLIAMSON – AND SO IT BEGINS…

By Terry Gray

          Mike Kuntz of Smoke Free Louisville fame should be proud, and ashamed of himself and his organization.  Smoke Free Louisville has been instrumental in the battle to ban cigarettes from local bars and restaurants.  They cite many arguments for their cause, but the reason that I’ve heard most is that they want to protect hospitality workers from second hand smoke.

          Brown and Williamson recently announced that it will be closing its corporate headquarters in Louisville and moving to North Carolina.  Among the reasons for this move, they cite tobacco settlement costs and high tobacco taxes.  These reasons cannot be directly attributed to Mike Kuntz and Smoke Free Louisville’s unfriendly actions toward tobacco, but the attitudes that they represent can be.  It is clear that complete eradication of tobacco is the goal of Smoke Free Louisville and its sister organizations across the country.

          Brown and Williamson has been a big player in Louisville’s economy for 76 years, not only as an employer but also as a taxpayer and contributor to many social programs.  It has also sponsored “Light Up Louisville” and “Thunder Over Louisville.”  Its presence in the social structure of Louisville has been felt by almost 80 organizations, from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and Center for Women and Families to the Louisville Zoo and Wayside Christian Mission.

          Brown and Williamson has voluntarily made these contributions to our city and funded many of our social health services.  It has involuntarily funded Smoke Free Louisville’s efforts to remove smoking from bars and restaurants through tobacco settlement money totaling $126 million in 2002 for Kentucky.

          In Kentucky, smokers pay 20 cents a pack to state government and 95 cents a pack for other government profits ( including tobacco settlements), while cigarette manufacturers make 12 cents a pack.  Yet, from these 12 cents, they voluntarily contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars to local charities and functions.  And where do the majority of the government’s profits go?  Some of them are used to help put tobacco out of business.

“In the 1970s and 80s Antismoking groups claimed that cigarette taxes should be raised, because nonsmokers were being unfairly forced to pay extra taxes to care for old and sickly smokers. The argument of fairness is a powerful one, and many smokers resigned themselves to a future of doubled or even tripled taxes. The specter of cigarette taxes rising from the 25 cents or so that was common then to levels of 50 cents or even a dollar was daunting but seemed, in fairness, to be unavoidable.  

As the 1980s drew to a close though, new information began to emerge. An article in The Journal of the American Medical Association by a researcher named Manning looked at the social costs and taxes related to drinking and smoking and arrived at an unexpected conclusion. Manning’s analysis concluded that, to reflect true fairness, smokers actually should get PAID between 22 cents and $1.28 by nonsmokers for every pack consumed in order to equalize the costs/savings from their habit. (Manning et al, "The taxes of sin; do smokers and drinkers pay their way?", JAMA:261:1604 (1989) ) 

The factor that had previously been ignored by Antismoking Crusaders in their push to raise taxes that would pay their own salaries was the fact that, while statistics pointed toward smokers getting cancer and heart disease younger and more often and thus requiring expensive care, those same statistics claimed that smokers were dying earlier and thus were not running up long term nursing home and geriatric care bills or even collecting their fair share of social security payments!”

(From Dissecting Antismokers' Brains by Michael J. McFadden www.AntiBrains.com )

          Brown and Williamson pumps $37 million a year into our local economy in the form of doing business locally.  It employs 450 people in Louisville; 450 people that support families, pay taxes, and also support the local economy. 

          It would seem to this writer that protecting Brown and Williamson and what they have done for Louisville should take monumental precedence over protecting consenting hospitality workers from the perils of second hand smoke.

          Mayor Abramson took this move as a hard blow to Louisville.  He should have expected it.  His actions in calling for the Metro City Council and Greater Louisville Incorporated to look into a smoking ban and the subsequent battle over this issue should have been weighed a little more carefully in light of Brown and Williamson’s contributions.  The mayor said that the city was never given a chance to offer incentives for Brown and Williamson to stay.  How about a friendly atmosphere and a call from the Mayor to refrain from attacking one of Louisville’s biggest contributors – for starters?

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