Money and cigarettes BY AL DIAMON

I'm thinking of taking up smoking.

It's true a three-pack-a-day habit will increase my risk of dying of lung cancer and heart disease, force me outside in the winter months to satisfy my craving for nicotine, stain my teeth the color of bug innards, and make me smell like the MERC incinerator in Biddeford. But this isn't about health or hygiene. It's strictly financial.

There's good money to be made conning state government into convincing me not to get hooked.

Let's start with the Maine Tobacco Helpline. Since 2001, this phone service, which is actually based in Seattle, has spent about $7.2 million of taxpayers' money taking calls from nearly 25,000 people who want to break the habit. That comes to about three-quarters of a phone call every hour or about $300 for every tobacco-addicted wretch who seeks assistance. Nevertheless, the call center says it'll soon need additional funding or it'll stop handling the state's butt problems.

I've come up with a method to avoid that extra expense, while keeping smoking emissions in check. Consider this statistic: Maine officials say the phone counseling only works for a minority of callers — just 23.4 percent of those who've asked the Helpline for assistance actually quit for as long as six months — so the price tag on each cured specimen (however temporary) is more than $1200.

I'll promise not to start smoking for at least six months if the state pays me a mere $1000.

That's a significant savings for taxpayers, not to mention a major incentive for me not to engage in a new vice (as well as an opportunity to earn extra cash for my old vices).

The skeptical among you will dismiss this idea, assuming our beleaguered state budget couldn't possibly afford to pay people not to smoke. But it could. Thanks to the recent dollar-per-pack hike in the cigarette tax, Maine will collect over $140 million this fiscal year. In addition, the tobacco industry will make an annual payment to the state of about $50 million, courtesy of a 1998 court settlement. That's $190 million that can be used for bribes.

How cost-effective would that be? Way more than the Helpline.

Less than 10 percent of the state's 229,000 cravers of cancer sticks have ever used the service. According to a 2004 Gallup survey, two-thirds of smokers wouldn't even consider making that call. "It is clear from the data," the Gallup report states, "that smokers are more interested in medications to help them quit rather than counseling services that are either in person or over the telephone."

Between 1990 and 2004, the percentage of Mainers who regularly imbibed tobacco byproducts declined from 27 percent to 21 percent. During that same period, the state spent roughly $100 million on anti-smoking programs or more than $7000 for every one of the approximately 14,000 nicotine fiends it reformed.

Under my plan, we could afford to free 95,000 slaves of the noxious weed from bondage every year. That would amount to over 40 percent of all the smokers in Maine.

Except that some of those lining up for this handout would be con artists like me who don't actually indulge in the filthy habit. No matter. Even if only one recipient in 10 is legitimate, that still means 9500 actual tobacco freaks would quit, a far larger figure than the average of less than 1000 per year produced by those annoying TV spots (annual cost: almost $100,000) and boring health lectures to high school kids (annual cost: $1.6 million).

And a 90-percent fraud rating is still better than most programs administered by the state Department of Health and Human Services.

Another point in my favor: Paying tax dollars to people who have no intention of pounding coffin nails into their lungs may be a scam, but no more so than the state's statistical analysis of the success of anti-smoking programs.

On November 15, Maine officials announced the teen-smoking rate had declined by 60 percent over the past eight years. That might lead you to conclude that more than 22,000 young hoodlums were no longer hanging out on street corners sucking illegally obtained smoke into their lungs. But that's not quite true.

In January, the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan released a study that claimed tobacco-attack programs in schools had convinced nearly 20,000 Maine kids not to get ciggy with it in the first place. So, almost all the decline in teen smoking wasn't about quitting. It was about not starting. Which is, at best, tricky to measure and, at worst, easy to overstate.

The report estimated those impressionable youngsters' lack of consumption would save more than $200 million in healthcare costs. Governor John Baldacci said that justified all the money spent on prevention, which, over the past three years, has amounted to about $2400 per Kool-cured kid.

I'm not ashamed to demand less than half that much.

Pay up, or I'm lighting up.

Got a match? Yeah, your opinion and my ash. Even so, you can e-mail me at ishmaelia@gwi.net