Summer 2017 SAVI Online Magazine Emagazine Summer 2017 mn and ae edits - web | Page 8

FEATURE STORY
UNEVEN SUCCESS–AND ACCESS–WHEN IT
COMES TO TOBACCO
The sharp decline in smoking rates since the 1960s
is a remarkable public health success story.
About 45 percent of the U.S. population
smoked in the mid-1960s. In the last half
century, the rate has fallen by two-thirds,
to about 15 percent.
But the success is uneven, and the
story is complicated. Smoking rates vary
widely from state to state, city to city, and
even neighborhood to neighborhood. In
Indiana, 20.6 percent of the population
smokes—the 12th highest rate in the
nation. In Marion County, the rate is just
as high: 21.8 percent of the population
smokes. In the five states with the lowest
smoking rates, the numbers range from
nine to 14 percent.
Just as smoking rates vary widely
across geographies, access to tobacco
is radically uneven from place to place.
That’s the key finding of a new report
from The Polis Center, Unequal Access,
which details the density of tobacco
retailing in the Indianapolis area.
“While unequal access typically
refers to less access to a desirable
resource by marginalized populations,”
the report notes, “greater access by
and to marginalized populations is the
troublesome inequity” in the case of
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tobacco products and tobacco marketing.
The disparities in tobacco access
matter because greater density of
tobacco retailers has been associated
with higher rates of smoking. High
density of retailers also means there is
a concentration of tobacco marketing
among populations that are already
vulnerable to high rates of tobacco use.
Unequal Access helps policymakers
and public health professionals
connect these dots—between poor
health outcomes, high smoking rates,
access to tobacco products, and
potential solutions.
“We’ve known for a long time that
smoking is bad—that it causes cancer
and a lot of other health problems,”
says Karen Frederickson Comer, a co-
author of the report and the director
of collaborative research and health
geoinformatics at The Polis Center.
“And yet, despite all this knowledge, our
population continues to smoke at higher
rates than the rest of the nation. So the
question is, what more can we do to
target the problem?”