We Must Keep The Young From Starting To Smoke

Driving past a local high school recently, I was amazed to see kids flooding out of the school for a cigarette break.

I felt enraged, sad and, I must admit, a little hopeless when I saw these teenagers lighting up.

Enraged because it is illegal to sell tobacco to anyone under age 18, and yet here were kids, many of them definitely younger than that, smoking.

State law also prohibits smoking on public school campuses, but seeing students step just a few feet away from school property to smoke still felt like a violation and certainly a mockery of that law.

I felt sad and helpless because I know that many of the kids I saw that day are already addicted to nicotine, addicted at an age far too young for them to appreciate smoking’s long-term consequences. I hear many parents, smokers and nonsmokers alike, pleading for help to prevent their children from becoming hooked on tobacco. That’s exactly where we need to begin the fight.

Though smoking rates among adults have declined steadily over the past 30 years, they have leveled off among teens. That’s good news for a multi-billion-dollar tobacco industry that relies on a steady supply of new young smokers to replace the roughly 3,000 customers it loses each day - because they either quit or die. But it’s bad news for our country.

Tobacco use exacts a terrible toll on Americans. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that in 1993 taxpayers paid $21.6 billion in medical costs related to tobacco use. Here in Washington state we spend more than $1 million a day in direct medical costs associated with smoking. What we can’t quantify is the enormous pain, suffering and loss for both individual smokers and their families. Each year cigarettes kill more Americans than fires, illegal drugs, homicides, suicides, AIDS, car accidents and alcohol combined. This health crisis demands action, and that brings us back to our kids.

Almost all new users of tobacco are children and adolescents. According to the CDC, 89 percent of adult smokers began using cigarettes by age 18; the average age at which most smokers first use tobacco is 14 1/2. If a young person reaches 18 without being a regular smoker, he or she is very unlikely to use tobacco as an adult.

The solution seems simple: Prevent kids from becoming addicted to nicotine, thereby reducing smoking rates, and we’re on our way to a healthier population. So where do we begin?

First, let’s get serious about limiting young people’s access to tobacco. A national survey of underage smokers reported that 70 percent buy their own cigarettes. Let’s make the law against tobacco sales to minors effective with better enforcement, and make the fines meaningful enough that every retailer will check ID before selling tobacco to a young person.

Then, let’s price cigarettes out of the reach of our children. We know that for every 10 percent increase in the price of a pack of cigarettes, there is a 14 percent decline in teen consumption and a 12 percent decline in the number of children who otherwise would have begun to smoke. Keep those figures in mind the next time your legislator is asked to approve a cigarette tax increase.

And, finally, let’s stop encouraging children to smoke. Cigarette manufacturers insist their advertising is intended only to entice adult smokers to switch brands, but young people can’t help but be exposed to the many positive images of smoking that paper our communities on billboards, in magazines, in store windows, on merchandise, and on in-store displays.

Sure, we tell our kids that smoking is bad for them, but every day they see, as one advertising executive put it, “the kind of people most people would like to be, doing the things most people would like to do, and smoking up a storm.” Cigarette advertising promises all the things a vulnerable young teen is hoping for: independence, good looks, individuality, a slender figure, fun - all wrapped up in the cachet of forbidden, adult pleasure.

Limiting youth access to tobacco, increasing its price, and limiting tobacco advertising are sensible solutions that can work. If you believe that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, let’s tackle our tobacco problem where it begins, with our children.

xxxx