Millions of dollars originally intended for smoking cessation programs in Massachusetts have been diverted to offset budget deficits, leaving the state struggling to fund quit‐​smoking hotlines, treatment programs and anti‐​tobacco advertising, the New England Center for Investigative Reporting has found. … “Roughly 99 percent of all the tobacco dollars that come into the state are used for something else,” said Stephen Shestakofsky, recently retired executive director of Tobacco Free Massachusetts, an anti‐​tobacco advocacy group. He was referring to the nearly $254 million in tobacco‐​related legal awards given to Massachusetts in 2012. More than $561 million in tobacco taxes was also collected, bringing the state’s total tobacco tally to just over $815 million, the CDC reports.

On the one hand, it’s not as if I’d urge the state of Massachusetts to sink vast sums into the paternalist project of hectoring its citizens to quit, especially not at a time when its taxpayers are already having to foot a steep tab for its RomneyCare health insurance experiment. On the other hand, we can now see that it was the purest pretense for attorneys general in states like Massachusetts to have portrayed the Great Tobacco Robbery settlement of some years back as motivated by a supposed need for new “public health” outlays, as opposed to sheer plunder and the interests of the various lawyers involved.

That’s worth remembering next time you hear a proposal to extract large sums from the food industry (either through taxation or, as some in the legal profession would like, by suing them for it under some creative theory) with the promise that funds will then be earmarked for anti‐​obesity efforts. In practice, after voters’ attention wanders, funds ordinarily get earmarked for the advancement of the political interests of those in power.