Minnesota’s Free Quit Tobacco Program
You Already Paid for Quit Partner MN
I was paying for gas in Chaska a couple weeks ago and looking at the wall behind the register while the guy in front of me bought a pack of cigarettes. I wasn't doing math at the time. I did it later.
On January 1, Minnesota's cigarette taxes went up again. As of this year the state excise tax is 15.2 cents per cigarette, which is $3.04 on a pack of twenty, and on top of that there's a separate cigarette sales tax of 84 cents a pack. Before the tobacco, before the shipping, before the store's markup, the state's share of that pack is $3.88.
I'll say the quiet part. I'm not against those taxes. They work, and working is the point of them.
What I have a problem with is that they're regressive, which is a word economists use for a tax that takes a bigger bite out of a smaller income. The person paying it is very often the person who can least afford it, and a tax designed to push you toward quitting is a lousy deal if nobody hands you anything to quit with.
Minnesota does hand you something. I'd guess most of the people paying that $3.88 have never heard of it.
What Quit Partner actually is
Quit Partner is the state's quit-tobacco program, run by the Department of Health with the coaching provided by National Jewish Health, a respiratory hospital in Denver that does this for a living. It covers cigarettes, vapes, and chew. It's free and confidential. Since it launched in 2020, more than 18,000 Minnesotans have used it.
Here's what free means in practice, which is more than people expect.
Free quit medication, mailed to your house. Patches, gum, or lozenges, your choice, for anyone 18 and up. The state says people typically get theirs within two to three business days of asking.
A coach on the phone, any hour. Phone coaching runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week at 1-800-QUIT-NOW. That matters more than it sounds like it does, because cravings don't keep office hours. Online chat runs long hours too, though not around the clock.
Actual trained people. The coaches all hold a bachelor's degree, usually in psychology or social work, and they're certified Tobacco Treatment Specialists, not a call center reading a script. Signing up takes about fifteen minutes.
Text and email support, if you'd rather not talk to anybody. Some people wouldn't. That's allowed.
The part I care about most
I've spent most of my working life in a room with people trying to change something about how they live, so let me be direct about one thing.
Quitting nicotine is not a test of character. Only about 3% of people who try it with no help succeed. Three. If ninety-seven out of a hundred people fail at something, the something is hard, and the ninety-seven are not weak. Pair coaching with quit medication and your odds roughly double. That's not a pep talk, it's just what the numbers do.
And relapse is built into how the program is designed. You get two enrollments in any twelve-month period. The state assumed you might not get it on the first try, because most people don't. If you quit in March and started again in June, you have not used up your chance.
There's a version built for you specifically
This is the part almost nobody knows, and it's the reason I wanted to write this one.
If you live with anxiety, depression, PTSD, bipolar disorder, ADHD, schizophrenia, or a substance use disorder, there's a separate behavioral health program with coaches trained for it. It's not a token difference. The standard program starts you with a two-week supply of medication; the behavioral health program includes seven coaching calls and twelve weeks of combination therapy, meaning the patch plus gum or lozenges together. If nicotine is doing work for you that something else will have to do instead, that's the program that knows it.
If you're pregnant or just had a baby, the pregnancy and post-partum program pairs you with the same female coach for all nine calls, which is not nothing when you're telling somebody the truth about a hard thing.
If you're American Indian or Alaska Native, the American Indian Quitline is a distinct program with ten coaching calls, twelve weeks of medication, and coaches who are all American Indian themselves. It draws the line between commercial tobacco and traditional tobacco, which the general program does not. It's 1-833-9AI-QUIT.
If you're a parent of a teenager who's vaping, My Life, My Quit serves ages 13 to 17, and I'd rather you hear this from me than find out later: teens can enroll without a parent's consent, and they don't get nicotine replacement. I know how that lands for some parents. I'd still rather a fifteen-year-old have a coach than have nobody.
Language, and one honest catch
The whole program runs in Español, Soomaali, and Hmoob, and for anything else the coaches bring an interpreter onto the line through a service that covers more than 200 languages. There's a TTY line at 1-877-777-6534.
Todo el programa está disponible en español. Puede empezar aquí, o llamar al 1-800-QUIT-NOW.
Now the catch, and weirdly it runs backward from what you'd expect: the standard, behavioral health, and pregnancy programs are built for Minnesotans who are uninsured or underinsured. If you have solid coverage, you may get routed to your own health plan's cessation benefit instead. That isn't a brush-off, and it's often a better benefit than the state program. But it's worth knowing before you call so you're not surprised. The American Indian Quitline and the teen program are open to everyone regardless of insurance. And on Medical Assistance, there's a page just for that.
Either way, call the same number. They'll sort out which door you belong at.
What it's worth in money
I'm not going to tell you what you spend, because I don't know what you buy or where you buy it. The state built a calculator that does it for you. Put in your own number and your own habit and look at the annual figure.
For most people it's the size of a real bill. A car payment, or close to it.
One more thing
You already paid for this. You paid for it at the counter, $3.88 at a time, for years.
I don't know whether this is your month for it. Nobody can tell you that. I've seen enough people get pushed into changing something before they were ready to know it usually backfires. But the phone number works at three in the morning, the patches show up in the mail in two days, and it costs you nothing to find out.
If you call and get stuck somewhere in it, tell me where. I'll help you get unstuck.