The Cost of a Pack of Cigarettes and Smoking Rates

What are you willing to pay?

How much does smoking cost? If you don't take into consideration the health costs, then the answer is still the same - it's expensive. (Click for some fun smoking facts ) The cost of the cigarette isn't really the issue here, so much as the tax that is levied on them. The old "sin tax" is often used to help fund many state or local municiple projects. Anything from education to hiring more police can be found wrapped up in the tax that smokers pay at the five and dime.

There was a recent article in the NY Post that detailed how a pack of cigarettes was now selling for $14.50 thanks to an abrupt increase in the tax. One smoker interviewed said she realized it was something tatamount to an idiot tax, but she'd have to go right on paying it. Another commenter said the tax hike was outrageous and how dare the government demand more money for cigarettes.

Tobacco friendly states add very little in the way of tax, for instance, Virginia adds only $0.30 to their packs of cigarettes while New York adds a hefty $4.35 on average to a pack. This is quite a wide range and points to the political pressure that Big Tobacco can exert on local state representatives.

So how does the price of cigarettes effect smoking cessation? Do people eventually hit a point where the immediate cost of smoking becomes too great and they are finally "forced" to quit? The journal Addiction published an article that looked at this very issue. The researchers looked at 2000 smokers and evaluated their motivation to quit, cigarette prices, nicotine dependence and health knowledge. The title of the article is "Do cigarette prices motivate smokers to quit? New evidence from the ITC survey."

Ross and others, found that higher cigarette prices increased the likelihood that smokers would quit, however, they achieved statistically significant results in only 1 of the 2 models evaluated. They also discovered that having access to cheaper cigarette sources did not slow down smoking cessation. But they did say current smokers would be more responsive to quitting if these cheaper sources were not available. Still though, they concluded that smoking cessation was associated with higher cigarette prices; even when there were cheaper sources of cigarettes available.

One last little caveat, in preparing for this blog post, I ran across a newspaper article out of Spain where researchers tried to find the real cost of a pack of cigarettes that was inclusive of the health costs. Their cost was $149 per pack. Now multiply that by 365 days and you get a "real cost" equal to $54,385 per year per smoker.

Hum...I wonder what would happen to our Medicare tax spending if nobody smoked?