ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, September 19, 1996 TAG: 9609190034
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A10 EDITION: METRO
WITH THE exception of a big hike in the federal tax on cigarettes (the one measure conspicuously missing from President Clinton's recent crackdown), there isn't a lot the feds can do, that is effective and constitutional, about adolescent smoking. Washington is too far removed from the scene of the crime.
This reality only makes more urgent, however, the need to engage the battle closer to home. The Virginia Department of Health recently sent kids ages 12 to 17 into stores throughout the commonwealth. Of more than a thousand (supervised) attempts to buy cigarettes, 37 percent were successful. In Western Virginia, they were able to buy smokes 44 percent of the time.
The Tobacco Institute calls this good news. Noted a lobbyist for that shameless group, the state findings show that minors are not able to buy cigarettes in a majority of cases. Whoopee! Break out the champagne! For that matter, what's the big deal anyway - if nicotine isn't addictive and smoking doesn't kill 450,000 Americans a year?
The big deal, well-understood by the cigarette makers, is that almost all smokers start as minors.
Virginia law prohibits the sale of tobacco to anyone under 18. Violators are subject to fines of $50 to $250. Yet, as the health department demonstrated, the law is routinely ignored. A majority of teen-agers don't smoke; most retailers are scrupulous about upholding the statute. But some merchants clearly are profiting from illegal sales, in part because they lack any fear of consequences.
Leonard Jason, a psychology professor at DePaul University in Chicago, for eight years has studied tobacco sales to adolescents. He recommends an enforcement strategy that combines business licences for selling tobacco with sting operations in which teens working with police are sent into stores to try to buy cigarettes.
"The real solution to the problem of teen smoking," he wrote last week in The Christian Science Monitor, "is to build in consequences for businesses that sell cigarettes to kids illegally." According to Jason, "when merchants know that random stings will occur in their stores at least three times a year, the short-term profits they gain from selling cigarettes to kids are overshadowed by the prospect of fines and loss of their tobacco license."
Woodbridge, Ill., a Chicago suburb, started a merchant sting operation several years ago. Jason's research showed a dramatic drop in teen-age smoking two years after the enforcement began. Today, Woodbridge high school students are half as likely to be regular smokers as teens of the same age in towns that do not limit cigarette sales.
Of course, this is just research, necessarily tentative. Virginia leaders could ignore it, just as they do the data showing a drop in smoking by price-sensitive adolescents when the cost of cigarettes is raised significantly.
Virginians shouldn't expect too much from their governor and legislature, unconscionable protectors of the lowest state cigarette tax in the nation. On top of which, thanks in part to House Majority Leader Dick Cranwell of Vinton, localities are prohibited from passing tobacco ordinances stricter than state law.
Even so, nothing prevents authorities, state or local, from mounting sting operations to seek out, publicize, punish and deter that minority of retailers willing to sell illegally to teen-agers the implements of addiction, disease and premature death.
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