Following is testimony given by Emilie Gilde, Director of Tobacco Use and Cardiovascular Disease Prevention. The statement was presented to the Budget and Taxation Committee on behalf of Dr. Wen on February 2, 2017.

Thank you for allowing me to speak today. My name is Emilie Gilde and I am the Director of Tobacco Use and Cardiovascular Disease Prevention at the Baltimore City Health Department.

Tobacco use drives the leading cause of death in Baltimore – heart disease – this issue is really pertinent to what we do.

I want to take a couple of minutes and share a story with you. When I started my job at the health department, I continually heard about a program we used to have, The Tobacco Bus. To be honest, at first I thought it sounded a little silly. It was a bus that would visit schools or other community spots. Kids could get on the bus and do different activities to learn about the harms of tobacco use. The program ended before my time – in 2010 or 2011.

I started to notice that my staff were routinely receiving these fax requests from schools—and phone calls too. All of the requests were for the bus to visit the schools or communities, although the program hadn’t existed for many years. We told the schools that we could instead give a presentation, but they weren’t interested – they wanted the bus.

Fast forward several years to focus groups we conducted about youth smoking in Baltimore. We wanted to know about kids’ experiences and the kinds of programming we could do that they would like. One of the first things the kids talked about was getting on the tobacco bus when they were in elementary school. They talked about how that experience had shaped them and transformed into an identity against smoking that they have to this day. The bus did this for over 25,000 kids every year.  It gave them an experience and a way to leave the classroom in order to learn without going too far because the bus could come to them.

But not anymore. When our funding was decreased, we could no longer afford the bus.

As the person who is responsible for reaching our youth about one of the top ways we can help our kids live longer, it worries me that only about 50 percent of our middle and high school students report that they were taught about the dangers of tobacco use in school (Maryland Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 2014).

We are missing opportunities to help our kids live long and healthy lives.

More than half of Baltimore high school students think that smokers have more friends (Maryland Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 2014) and 33 percent of high school students have used electronic cigarettes, 17 percent in middle school (Maryland Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 2014).

It’s not just our youth that this impacts. Adult tobacco use rose to 28.3 percent in 2014 from 24.2 percent in 2012. This is the highest by number and percentage compared to any other Maryland local jurisdiction (Maryland Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance System 2012 and 2014).

I’m here to ask you to give a favorable report on this bill. The fact is that the Tobacco Bus is just one of the aspects of our program that we can no longer afford to have. Please help ensure that we can do our jobs effectively to prevent the number one cause of preventable death for our residents. Thank you.