Jaycees Kicking Habit National Campaign Rolls Through Town To Snuff Out Youth Smoking

In a bus splattered with dead bugs and mud, members of the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce rolled into Spokane Tuesday campaigning to stop stores from selling cigarettes to minors.

Kelly Wills, national Jaycees president, kicked off the organization’s program to fight youth smoking in Washington state.

In Spokane, clerks are fined $50 if they are caught selling to teenagers, and stores are fined $100. Five violations in two years and a business license can be revoked for five years.

“There is a law on the books,” Wills told reporters at Cavanaugh’s Inn at the Park. “There’s no ifs, and or buts about this.”

The group is out to stop the butts.

About 50 members of the Valley and Spokane Jaycees chapters will pound the streets and target about 5,000 tobacco-selling stores in the area.

They’ll ask merchants to sign pledges not to sell cigarettes to youths and to place cards in their windows declaring: “Jaycees Against Youth Smoking.”

Spokane was the 262nd city on the 344-city tour. The bus stopped by Coeur d’Alene on Monday night and pressed on to Colville and Wenatchee after Spokane Tuesday.

More than 1,400 communities nationwide have signed on to the program, Wills said.

The bus has its own story. There’s a stuffed pink Energizer Bunny pounding a drum on the dashboard. There’s a map of the United States on a cabinet with states marked off in colored blocks.

“We’re stopping access by 60 percent in those communities we’re in,” Wills said. He based this figure on smokers questioned in 100 schools in targeted neighborhoods. Six out of 10 youths who smoke told the Jaycees they couldn’t buy cigarettes at their former spots, Wills said.

The program, around since 1994, isn’t a new idea.

The tobacco industry sponsors a program called “It’s the Law” to inform store clerks it’s illegal to sell tobacco to anyone under 18. The program gives participating merchants window stickers to alert customers to the law.

But one recent study published in the American Journal of Public Health concluded “It’s the Law” participants sold to minors just as often as their competitors.

At the Zip-Trip at 1712 N. Division, where an “It’s the Law” sign hangs on a wall, assistant manager Jesse Whitwell said, “We check everybody’s ID that appears to be under 18.

“If a customer comes in and doesn’t have ID and another person from the same car comes in and tries to buy, we refuse to sell to them.”

Whitwell said he’d be happy to display the Jaycees’ sign, too. But he added that teenagers who wanted to buy cigarettes can find a way to get them. “Absolutely,” he said.

It’s easier for teenagers to buy cigarettes now than in the past, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A recent CDC survey found that 62 percent of teen smokers bought their own cigarettes in 1993, up from 58 percent in 1989.

The government says some 3 million teenagers smoke and a third will eventually die from a smoking-related illness. About 3,000 kids nationwide start smoking every day, according to the U.S. Department of Health Services.

, DataTimes