Meet Our National Youth Advocate of the Year

Abby Michaelsen works to pass California Cancer Research Act

Posted by: Abby Michaelsen, National Youth Advocate of the Year | May 18, 2011

 

It is an immense honor to be the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids’ National Youth Advocate of the Year! I am so excited to be in Washington to receive this award and to meet my fellow advocates who have been working tirelessly in their own communities on their tobacco prevention campaigns.

At home, I’m focused on helping my local American Heart Association with our campaign for the California Cancer Research Act. This act would increase the state’s tobacco tax by $1, with all the new funds going towards tobacco prevention and cessation programs and cancer research.  Voters will decide the issue in the next statewide election, though the exact date of that is still uncertain. 

Although California has long been a leader in fighting tobacco – and our state is so often associated with healthy living — we’ve unfortunately fallen behind on tobacco control. The American Lung Association gives us an “F” for failing to adequately fund tobacco prevention programs, an “F” for poor coverage of services to help smokers quit and a “D” for our low cigarette tax.

The California Cancer Research Act would help change that, by boosting the cigarette tax, which is currently only 87cents and hasn’t been increased since 1999. That low tax rate puts us 33rd among the states and the District of Columbia, even though higher cigarette taxes are proven to reduce smoking, especially among kids.

More than 70 percent of Californians support the tax increase, but that doesn’t mean its passage is guaranteed.  Big Tobacco will spend big bucks to defeat this initiative with deceptive campaigns and political front groups.  In fact, the industry has defeated numerous attempts to increase cigarette taxes in California. So we’re fighting back.  We are galvanizing support through local meetings in which volunteers, heart disease survivors, and other supporters create personal action plans to gain support for the act.

I attended one of these meetings with Health & Heart Club members from my school. We decided to utilize our club’s resources to spread awareness about the importance of this initiative. Though many of the students at our school won’t be eligible to vote on the tax, we believe that it’s still important to get everyone in our student body involved. We hope that students urge their parents to go out to the polls to support the California Cancer Research Act.  And we’ll be writing letters to every teacher and staff member at our school informing them of the act and asking for their support.

The California Cancer Research Act would truly make an impact.  The higher tax on every pack will reduce smoking, and the education and research the money is to fund also will help save lives.  With the current economic and budget climate in the U.S and especially in California, research funding is not the first on the government’s agenda.  Yet, California is in desperate need of funding for tobacco prevention programs and research.

With the new added revenue of the California Cancer Research Act, California will be given the opportunity to truly take a stand against tobacco, while saving thousands of lives through medical research and education.