Increases the excise tax paid by wholesalers or dealers on cigarettes and tobacco products sold or used after June 30, 2002, to 10 cents per cigarette, and to fifty percent of the wholesale price of the tobacco product.

A BILL FOR AN ACT

SECTION 1. The legislature finds that smoking-related diseases claim an estimated 430,700 American lives each year, including those affected indirectly, such as babies born prematurely due to prenatal maternal smoking and some of the victims of "secondhand" exposure to tobacco's carcinogens. Smoking costs the United States approximately $97,200,000,000 each year in health care costs and lost productivity. It is directly responsible for eighty-seven per cent of lung cancer cases and causes most cases of emphysema and chronic bronchitis.

Smoking is also a major factor in coronary heart disease and stroke. It may be causally related to malignancies in other parts of the body and has been linked to a variety of other conditions and disorders, including slowed healing of wounds, infertility, and peptic ulcer disease.

Smoking during pregnancy accounts for an estimated twenty to thirty per cent of low-birth weight babies, up to fourteen per cent of pre-term deliveries, and some ten per cent of all infant deaths. Even apparently healthy, full-term babies of smokers have been found to be born with narrowed airways and curtailed lung function. In 1999, 12.9 per cent of women who gave birth smoked during pregnancy.

Smoking by parents is also associated with a wide range of adverse effects in their children, including exacerbation of asthma, increased frequency of colds and ear infections, and sudden infant death syndrome. An estimated 150,000 to 300,000 cases of lower respiratory tract infections in children less than eighteen months of age, resulting in 7,500 to 15,000 annual hospitalizations, are caused by secondhand smoke. Secondhand smoke involuntarily inhaled by nonsmokers from other people's cigarettes is classified by the United States Environmental Protection Agency as a known human (Group A) carcinogen, responsible for approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths annually in American nonsmokers.

Approximately 22.3 million American women are smokers. Current female smokers aged thirty-five years or older are twelve times more likely to die prematurely from lung cancer than nonsmoking females. More American women die annually from lung cancer than any other type of cancer. For example, lung cancer has caused an estimated 67,600 female deaths in 2000, compared with 40,800 estimated female deaths caused by breast cancer.

The purpose of this Act is to discourage smoking and the use of tobacco products by increasing the excise tax on cigarettes and tobacco products.

SECTION 2. Section 245-3, Hawaii Revised Statutes, is amended by amending subsection (a) to read as follows:

"(a) Every wholesaler or dealer, in addition to any other taxes provided by law, shall pay for the privilege of conducting business and other activities in the State:

Where the tax imposed has been paid on cigarettes or tobacco products, which thereafter become the subject of a casualty loss deduction allowable under chapter 235, the tax paid shall be refunded or credited to the account of the wholesaler or dealer. The tax shall be applied to cigarettes through the use of stamps."

SECTION 3. Statutory material to be repealed is bracketed and stricken. New statutory material is underscored.

SECTION 4. This Act shall take effect on July 1, 2002.