Although a pack of cigarettes may cost approximately six dollars, smoking related illness cost the United States a staggering three hundred billion dollars annually. Of this cost, approximately $170 billion is due to direct health care expenditures and $150 billion results from lost productivity (Xu, Bishop, Kennedy, Simpson, & Pechacek, 2015). The high public costs of treating tobacco related diseases is just the tip of the ice burg as tobacco users earn less due to premature death and exert undue economic hardship on their families. The economic impact on the poor is especially significant as more than ten percent of household income may be spent directly or indirectly on tobacco. This exacerbates the cycle of poverty as money spent on tobacco may be used for education, nutrition and shelter (De Beyer, Lovelace, & Yürekli, …show more content…
The TIPS campaign was very effective as it featured stories from actual smokers about the negative effects of smoking. In the advertisements smokers discussed what sacrifices and coping mechanisms they made for cigarettes. The campaign was advertised on television, radio, print, billboards, social media and the internet. The campaign’s target audience was adult smokers between the ages of 18 to 54. Perhaps even more effective than the stories were the visual images of people in the prime of their life with artificial limbs, surgical scars, dentures and premature babies. At the end of the advertisement people were encouraged to call the telephone quit line or visit the National Cancer Institute (NCI) smoking cessation website. The effectiveness of the TIPS campaign was measured by call volume and visitors to the smoking cessation website. Data was compared with volume from corresponding weeks in 2011. Calls received by the quit line increased 132 percent and visits to the website increased by 428 percent. The results indicate the willingness of smokers to seek information and assistance in order to quit (McAfee, Davis, Alexander, Pechacek, & Bunnell,