Iowa got mostly poor or failing grades on a new report card from the American Lung Association. In the tenth annual “State of Tobacco Control” report, the agency graded all 50 states on four proven policies to save lives and cut health care costs. Lung Association spokeswoman Katie Lorenz says Iowa got one “A,” one “D,” and flunked the other two categories.

“Tobacco prevention and control funding was slashed by 55%,” Lorenz says. “What we’re asking is that in order to improve that grade, at minimum, we restore funding levels to 2011 which was about 7.39-million.” Iowa’s now spending a little over three-million dollars on tobacco prevention and control while she says federal guidelines call for spending more than 36-million.

Lorenz says, “The CDC recommends a certain level in order to help smokers quit and make sure that children don’t start, the state needs to be funding at that level.” The report also gives Iowa an “F” for its smoking cessation programs, as the state offers no free aids like nicotine gum, patches or lozenges.

Iowa also rated a “D” for its cigarette tax of a dollar-36 per pack. Lorenz says if that tax was even a dollar higher, it would keep thousands more teens from starting to smoke while more adults would quit. “Iowans can certainly be proud of their ‘A’ for smokefree air, and that’s prohibiting all smoking in public and in workplaces,” she says.

“We do hope that in the future to get an A+ or maybe to do a little bit better, that we stop exempting the casinos and make those smokefree workplaces as well.” The full report is on-line with state-by-state breakdowns.

“Your listeners can visit www.stateoftobaccocontrol.org,” she says. “There’s a section where they can take action and send a letter to their governor or to their legislators and say, ‘We understand it’s important to prevent tobacco use in our state and we want to do our part to make that happen.’”

Overall, six states received four failing grades: Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia. Only four states got all passing grades: Delaware, Hawaii, Maine and Oklahoma. No state received straight A’s.

A push to get Iowa health care professionals to convince patients to quit smoking is seeing success. Doctors, dentists, nurses and other medical experts have referred almost 70% more smokers to the Quitline Iowa program than a year ago.

Doctors are telling smokers they can call the hotline or they’ll have a hotline operator call the patient. Aaron Swanson, interim director of the Iowa Division of Tobacco Use Prevention and Control, says that’s a huge boost. “We really got some help from our local partners in nearly every county in Iowa,” Swanson says.

“The Quitline Iowa campaign that we initiated a little over a year ago, ‘Operation 83,’ focused on the fact that 83% of Iowans who smoke actually want to quit and, if you’re a doctor hearing this for the first time, that’s a pretty good motivator for telling them about the free help from 1-800-Quit Now.”

Swanson says they’re seeing steady progress in getting Iowans to drop the unhealthy habit. “We’ve seen smoking rates in Iowa decrease over the past several years,” Swanson says. “As early as 2002, our smoking rate was just over 23% and that’s now at about 16%, so that represents about a 30% decrease in smoking rates.”

Swanson says the hotline staff is preparing for next week and next month, traditionally the busiest of the year as people across Iowa make New Year’s resolutions to stop smoking. “The staff at Quitline Iowa will help a caller build a quit plan that’s tailored to their needs,” Swanson says.

“They’ll walk them through that plan and even offer follow-up phone calls based around days and times that work for that individual’s schedule. Quitline Iowa is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, just by calling 1-800-Quit Now.”

Swanson says fewer than 5% of smokers who try to quit without medication or counseling are successful, but he says about 20% of callers to Quitline succeed. Tobacco is the leading preventable cause of death for Iowans, killing more than 4,400 people every year.

Health care costs in Iowa that are directly related to tobacco use total one-billion dollars a year.

A new report shows state programs designed to reduce tobacco use have been cut by 12% in the past year. The report by the Coalition of Public Health Organizations, says 36% of the funding has been cut in the last four years. Peggy Huppert of the American Cancer Society says that’s disappointing in the wake of Iowa’s 65% funding cut.

“We knew what the situation was here in Iowa, now we see that we are part of a very troubling national trend,” Huppert says. All states have faced budget troubles, but Huppert says Iowa’s cut is linked more to politics. Huppert says,”No other state program suffered a similarly sized cut, it really wasn’t so much the budget as it was objections to what the programs were doing.”

Lawmakers were not happy with the way the youth-led “Just Eliminate Lies” anti-tobacco program was run. One billboard that drew the ire of a legislator showed a sign for Lakeview Iowa and said “Tobacco can kill this town in one day.” Senator Steve Kettering, a Republican from Lake View, says the sign made the town which relies on tourism look like it was dead. (Lakeview story).

The position of the director of the Tobacco Use Prevention and Control Division was also cut by the governor’s new Public Health Department director.

Huppert is the director of government relations for the Iowa Chapter of the Cancer Society. She says the foe they’ve been fighting hasn’t cut its spending. She says the tobacco industry continues spending “tens of millions of dollars” aggressively marketing its product.

“We know that if the trend lines continue and the amount of money being spent by the state continues downward, while the tobacco company continues its upward, aggressively marketing, the smoking rates and the use of tobacco will climb,” Huppert says. Huppert says it’s unlikely the legislature will increase tobacco prevention funding this year and she says the only thing that will likely lead to new money is an increase in smoking.

“It may take a few years, so when we can go back to the legislature and show them that smoking has increased, that smokeless tobacco usage has increased, especially among young people, which it will, then we’ll probably get more money to reverse the trend,” Huppert said, “it’s unfortunate that it has to be that way, but it probably is what will happen.”

In the meantime, Huppert hopes the state can do something to prevent the increase in smoking among young people. She says they will be keeping an eye on state programs to see if they use “evidenced based programs.” Huppert says those programs don’t include adults talking to kids about smoking, which she says doesn’t work.

“What is an effective kids talking to kids, peer-to-peer, and that is what JEL was based on.” The national report says states are spending less than two cents of every dollar of revenue from the tobacco settlement and taxes to fight tobacco use.

You can see the whole report here: www.tobaccofreekids.org.