Taxing Your Butt

By Crispin Sartwell

Since the first ape lurched upright, civilization has achieved just one thing: crisis. Education has been in crisis since the founding of Plato's Academy. The drug crisis has been our national nightmare since 26 A.D. Various ecological crises have already destroyed us all many times over, according to experts. And Lord knows my personal life is in ruins.

But now a new crisis has emerged, a crisis which threatens to bury all the rest in a pile of reeking, lipstick-stained little bundles of toxicity. I refer, of course, to the cigarette-butt crisis. According to a study published in the journal Tobacco Control, the people of the world dispose in an illicit manner of 4.5 *trillion* cigarette butts each year.

That's 4,500,000,000,000 fag ends. Perhaps you will be able more easily to envision it like this: If you stacked 4.5 trillion cigarette butts on top of each other end to end, attaching each to the one below it with scotch tape, they would reach part way to the planet Mars.

Cigarette butts are the most common item in litter by number, accounting for one in five items collected. And the sheer mass and poundage may also be significant. In the course of my research for this article, I placed a cigarette filter on my bathroom scale. It didn't register, and yet I know that it weighed something, so I rounded it up to the nearest pound. If each butt weighed one pound, all the littered butts in the world in a given year would weigh as much as 10,000,000,000 of the largest professional wrestlers

Smokers often operate under the mistaken impression that their butts are biodegradable. Nothing could be further from the truth! Though the paper and tobacco in cigarettes are organic, more or less, filters are made of cellulose acetate, a form of plastic. And these filters contain in concentrated form all the toxic chemicals that the disappointed smoker/litterer couldn't manage to suck into his or her body.

In fact, a website devoted to the issue, CigaretteLitter.org, hints darkly - in virtue of what research is not clear - that chemicals leeched from cigarette butts make their way into aquatic life forms and threaten to topple the entire food chain. .

Cigarette butts also pose a terrible health risk to our children, one of the least-appreciated but most serious factors in the terrible crisis of children's health in our nation. The study in Tobacco Control pointed out that in 1994 and 1995, in the state of Rhode Island alone, there were 40 cases of cigarette butt ingestion among small children. Thirteen of these produced actual symptoms, such as gagging and (most seriously of all) lethargy.

But the state of Maine is fighting back. A proposal before the state legislature would put a nickel deposit on each filter, amounting to a dollar-per-pack tax, but encouraging recycling. Each butt would be stamped to identify it as having been bought in the state of Maine.

In Maine, according to an R.J. Reynolds spokesman speaking to the Kennebec Journal, the cost of cigarettes already includes $1.26 in taxes, which generates $77 million in revenue per year. Maine also receives $60 million per year from the tobacco settlement, and the governor wants to tack on another 24-cent tax. The deposit bill would add about $50 million dollars to state coffers. The average annual income of Maine smokers is approximately $22,000.

Now perhaps you are thinking that governments have achieved enough revenue enhancement through ever-increasing sin taxes and lotteries. Perhaps it is dawning on you, as it has previously dawned on our political leaders, that addicts can be taxed almost infinitely, because they will pay almost anything for what they're addicted to. Perhaps you are thinking that the people who are really exploiting addicts for profit are not the tobacco companies, but state legislatures.

Oh, you cynic. Maine is not only fighting big tobacco and the genocidal executives who kill you with your own enthusiastic cooperation; they are providing limitless opportunities for entrepreneurship. There are 225 billion butt-bucks available each year, and it is likely that some titan of industry, some environmentally savvy Bill Gates, will emerge to corner the market.

Then we will face a new problem: how to dispose each year of toxic waste approximately as massive as10 billion pro wrestlers - toxic waste that, if you listen to the public health administrators, makes weapons-grade plutonium look benign. Perhaps we can launch our butts, or at least the butts of those same public health administrators, into space.