Holy smokes!

Here's a news flash, which friend and fellow blogger Brad passed along today: Georgia ranks 48th in protecting kids from tobacco, according to a newly released report from a group of public health organizations including the American Heart Association. Here's the more troubling news flashes from the news flash:
-- Georgia currently spends $2.2 million a year on tobacco prevention programs, which is 5.3 percent of the minimum amount of $42.6 million recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
-- The tobacco companies spend more than $444 million a year on marketing in Georgia. This is almost 200 times what the state spends on tobacco prevention.
--Georgia this year will collect $405 million from the tobacco settlement and tobacco taxes, but will spend less than 1 percent of it on tobacco prevention.
-- Only 20 states – including Maine, Delaware and Colorado – are funding tobacco prevention programs at even half the minimum levels recommended by the CDC.
-- Tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, killing more than 400,000 people and costing nearly $100 billion in health care bills every year. Nearly 90 percent of all smokers start at or before age 18. Every day, another 1,000 kids become regular smokers, one-third of whom will die prematurely as a result.
Let me also state, for the record, that several friends are smokers and this is not meant to demonize them, as if smoking is the worst thing people ever do to themselves.
But it is recorded fact that tobacco (say, smoking) significantly heightens one's risk of heart and lung disease, among other maladies.