Dear Colleagues,

In its new report on Broken Promises to Our Children: A State-by-State Look at the 1998 Tobacco Settlement 18 Years Later, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and a coalition of public health organizations acknowledge the remarkable progress that has been made in decreasing smoking rates to 15.1% among adults and 10.8% among high school students (2015 NHIS and YRBS, respectively) and calls on the nation and all of us to do more.
 
The coalition notes that tobacco prevention and cessation programs save lives and money, and that investing in these programs may help eliminate smoking altogether by 2035. To achieve this goal, the coalition encourages federal, state, nonprofit and commercial sectors to take these important steps:

• Fund state tobacco prevention and cessation programs, including quitlines, at levels recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
• Expand federal activities such as the national media campaign, Tips from Former Smokers.
• Increase tobacco taxes, enact comprehensive smoke-free laws, provide health insurance coverage for tobacco cessation treatments, and effectively regulate all tobacco and nicotine products, including e-cigarettes.

This report is published at a critical time, as we hear the good news about tobacco prevention and cessation programs yielding the lowest-ever tobacco use rates, and also hear about looming threats to the funding streams that make these programs possible. Currently, the expenditures for state quitlines totals about $125M per year; about 18% of this total is contributed from the CDC’s Prevention and Public Health Fund (PPHF). The national media campaign, Tips from Former, is funded entirely by the PPHF. A proposal in Congress threatens to cut PPHF funding for tobacco prevention and cessation programs by more than half. It is more important than ever for all of us to educate our stakeholders – agency directors, business/insurance leaders, elected officials and colleagues in public health and medicine – on the effectiveness of our programs, the impact they have on improving the health of our communities, and the importance of strengthening our investments in them.
 
NAQC encourages you to read this report  and, as part of your New Year’s resolutions, to consider scheduling one morning a week to proactively educate stakeholders about the impact of your programs on countering the disease and death caused by tobacco and the importance of continued investment in these programs.  Through this action, you can help prevent breaking promises to our children.
 
Additional materials related to the report are available here.
 
Thank you for all you do to improve the health of smokers.
 
Best wishes for the holiday season,
 
Linda A. Bailey, JD, MHS
President and CEO
North American Quitline Consortium