ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, September 1, 1996 TAG: 9609040043
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
IN HIS crusade to reduce teen smoking by siccing the Food and Drug Administration on tobacco and trying to censor cigarette ads, President Clinton has engaged a worthy battle, but with the wrong weapons.
Here's a better strategy:
Enforce laws already on the books that prohibit tobacco sales to minors.
Clinton's crackdown, inappropriately issued as FDA fiat instead of enacted legislation, would require a photo ID for cigarette sales and make selling to children a federal offense. These are helpful steps.
But every state, including Virginia, already has laws against sales to minors. What's needed is enforcement.
According to Virginia Department of Health studies, 44 percent of retailers in Western Virginia will sell cigarettes to underage customers. Last week a news story quoted a 17-year-old who was smoking in front of Roanoke's City Market Building. Cigarettes are "easier to get than water," he said. "I haven't been carded since I was, like, 15."
A 14-year-old companion said she's been smoking a couple of years, up to a pack a day when she can afford it. "I think I've only been carded, like, three times in the last year."
Like, this is not acceptable. Why not deploy law-enforcement officers to crack down on retailers that sell to kids? And why not begin punishing such retailers when they are caught?
Counter cigarette ads with a campaign aimed at the teen-agers targeted by Big Tobacco.
Clinton is right to go after the demand as well as the supply side of adolescents' tobacco-consumption. But censorship isn't the way.
To be sure, tobacco companies invest billions in advertising to replace customers who are dying - and hardly anyone begins smoking after the age of 18. It is no coincidence that, after the cartoon character Joe Camel hit the scene, Camel's market share among underage smokers expanded from less than 1 percent to 33 percent.
Even so, the government cannot go around banning the use of pictures and color in ads for a lawful product. The answer to obnoxious speech is not regulation, but more speech - reminding people, for example, that smoking kills more Americans than do AIDS, cocaine, heroin, alcohol, fire, automobile accidents, homicides and suicides combined.
Big Tobacco may not mind funding ads that depict smoking as an adult activity forbidden to kids; that's part of the allure. But a cleverly done campaign, especially if reinforced with social stigmatization, could make a difference. In the 1960s, the American Cancer Society ran ads so effective that they helped prompt tobacco companies to take their ads off the air.
Raise the excise tax on tobacco products.
The is the big item missing from Clinton's crackdown. A hefty tax increase is a proven means of discouraging price-sensitive adolescents from taking up the habit. After cigarette taxes were raised to more than $3 per pack in Canada, the smoking rate among teens dropped by 60 percent.
A tobacco-tax hike in this country - say, $2 per pack - would not only bring in revenues to help offset the huge medical costs of smoking. It would help deter thousands of young people from becoming addicted.
Sad to say, no one expected the president to propose a tax increase of any sort in an election year. While going on and on about family values and protecting children, the politicians in Washington and Richmond in fact represent the tobacco industry's deadly interests in keeping cigarette taxes low and new waves of youngsters hooked.
LENGTH: Medium: 68 linesby CNB