Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, January 27, 1995 TAG: 9501280026
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
That has huge implications, including for prisons policy. But it isn't the only notable report from the drug front.
On the same day as the Justice Department's announcement, this newspaper published new statistics on teen-age smokers: There are, at least, 3.1 million, ages 12 to 18. Most started smoking at age 14; 70 percent become daily smokers by age 18.
Smoking is not a felony - no matter how much anti-smoking crusaders might wish it so - and this is as it should be. One would hope our elected representatives would be visibly, anxiously concerned about the health issues involving youngsters who take up cigarettes, a product that accounts for some 400,000 deaths across the nation every year.
It would be nice, too, to imagine that legislative interest in Richmond might be piqued by the tremendous medical costs associated with smoking - costs passed on each year, in part, to taxpayers.
But to get state officials' attention these days, it may be more useful to focus on the law-and-order aspect of teens' tobacco use. There is such an aspect.
Never mind that smokers aged 12 to 17 are more than 50 times more likely than nonsmokers to use cocaine, and 12 times more likely to take up the heroin habit. It is true that a portion of those 3.1 million teen-age smokers will need prisons cell one day - if they don't end up in coffins first. But this is in some measure a statistical trick. In fact, most smokers do not end up addicted to other drugs or languishing in expensive prisons.
Surely, though, another law-and-order question is worth contemplating: How many Virginia kids are among the 3.1 million smoking teens because laws prohibiting sales of cigarettes to minors are not being enforced? How many Virginia teens will suffer damaged lungs and arteries and can expect shortened lives because cigarettes, illegal for them, are so easy to come by?
If the experience of Woodridge, Ill., is any indication, cigarette smoking among young people can be reduced appreciably by enforcing laws that ban sales of tobacco to minors.
Woodridge, a Chicago suburb, has one of the nation's toughest tobacco-control ordinances. It imposes a fine of $25 on minors caught with tobacco; a $50 fine on teens caught trying to buy it. Merchants who sell tobacco products to under-age customers are slapped with a $500 fine; repeat violations can cost a merchant his license. And since Woodridge officials started strictly enforcing the 1989 law - they even use undercover teens in ``sting'' operations - teen-age smoking reportedly has been reduced to a fraction of the national levels.
If Virginia lawmakers are too busy with other matters to order crackdowns on teen smoking, they could achieve the same or better results by substantially increasing the state's cigarette tax, now lowest in the nation. Adolescents, who make up almost entirely the ranks of new smokers, would be most sensitive to that sting, and it would keep many kids from getting hooked.
Meantime, we wait - year after year, decade after decade - for attention and action from Richmond, as thousands of Virginia kids every year flout the law and start smoking, as thousands of other Virginians every year die horribly, and as state elected officials every year continue to confer with, and defer to, their friends in the tobacco lobby.
by CNB