EDITORIAL: Nevada gets poor grades in American Lung Association smoking report card

Nevada rated poorly on an American Lung Association report card for tobacco usage released last week, scoring barely above the Blutarsky Line, with one C and four F’s.

Review-Journal reporter Jesse Bekker reported that the use of “noncigarette tobacco products and limited funding for state tobacco control programs” led to the poor grades.

“Our perception of smoking is behind the times,” said Will Rucker, the lung association’s Nevada director. “People don’t recognize the true health impact that smoking has, and how wide-ranging the effects are beyond lung health.”

Really? What sentient human being above the age of 10 doesn’t realize that smoking cigarettes can cause a litany of potentially fatal health issues over the long term?

The ALA report seems primarily intended to put pressure on state policymakers to spend more money on programs intended to discourage smoking. Fair enough. But it also paints an overly pessimistic portrait of Nevada.

The percentage of Nevada adults who smoke has dropped significantly over the years and continues to decline. In 1995, the Centers for Disease Control reported that 26.3 percent of Silver State adults regularly lit up. The ALA puts the number at 16 percent today, a 40 percent drop.

In addition, the ALA in 2002 pegged Nevada’s teen smoking rate at 33 percent. The group’s recent snapshot found that just 7 percent of today’s Nevada high school students smoke cigarettes. That’s a massive 79 percent decrease. Where is that reflected in the group’s grading?

In fact, the lung association apparently marked down the state because of e-cigarette use by teens, something Mr. Rucker described as alarming. But as Jacob Sullum of Reason magazine pointed out last week, the notion that vaping will lead kids to later become addicted to cancer sticks “seems wildly implausible in light of current trends. Cigarette smoking by teenagers has continued to fall despite a surge in experimentation with vaping.”

In their crusade to eradicate tobacco and nicotine use, Mr. Rucker and his colleagues continue to ignore evidence that e-cigarettes are far less harmful than the real thing and can help adults wean themselves off the Marlboros.

For instance, a report released last week by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine acknowledged that e-cigarettes contain “fewer numbers and lower levels of most toxicants than smoke from combustible tobacco cigarettes” and that “short-term human studies suggest that e-cigarettes are likely to be far less harmful than combustible tobacco cigarettes.” If adult smokers substitute vaping for cigarette use, the academy concluded, “the benefit to public health could be considerable.”

That’s something the American Lung Association should celebrate. As is the fact that fewer and fewer Nevadans — both teens and adults alike — are regular cigarette smokers.