Price may not deter smoking

By Joene Hendry

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Raising the price of cigarettes does not appear to deter current smokers from lighting up, research suggests.

"People who are still smoking are probably selectively those who are more addicted, so they are less likely to quit smoking if the price of their habit increases," Dr. Peter Franks, of University of California-Davis in Sacramento, told Reuters Health.

Franks and colleagues analyzed cigarette prices and smoking prevalence in the United States among people with incomes below the 25th percentile (lower) and at or above the 25th percentile (higher).

They looked at a 20-year period that included 14 years before and 6 years after tobacco companies agreed to change how they marketed tobacco products and began financing anti-smoking campaigns.

Overall, smoking rates declined over the 20-year period. At the same time, the average price per cigarette pack increased from $2.24 during the pre-agreement period to $3.67 during the post-agreement period, the researchers report in the American Journal of Public Health.

But despite the price increases, smoking rates among the lower income population increased from 27.7 percent during the pre-agreement period to 28.6 percent during the post-agreement period. By contrast, smoking rates decreased from 23.9 to 21.6 percent during the same periods in the higher income population.

The findings, Franks offers, suggest that current smokers have become relatively price resistant. The findings also suggest that price-resistant smokers appear disproportionately concentrated among the lower income population.

"Future increases in price (for example through taxation) are unlikely to yield health benefits in terms of significant numbers of persons quitting," Franks concludes.

SOURCE: The American Journal of Public Health, October 2007