ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, March 4, 1997 TAG: 9703040060
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
THE DILLY-Dally Mini-Market in Salem makes as strong a case for tightening controls on cigarette sales as could be dreamed of by an anti-smoking zealot: The owner expects to lose 25-30 percent of his business by eliminating sales to minors.
Roger McNulty hasn't been duped by kids who look older than their age. He's been selling tobacco to 16- and 17-year-olds knowingly, as long as their parents don't object, despite the fact that such sales are (wink, wink) illegal. He'd just informally decided what was reasonable, and made up his own rules.
McNulty may be more forthright than most, but he's hardly the only shopkeeper with a cavalier attitude about selling smokes to youngsters.
Most store operators would claim that they don't intentionally sell cigarettes to anyone under the legal age of 18. But, hey - 15, 17, 18 ... who can tell precisely how old a teen-ager is?
What risk have store clerks run, anyway, if they assumed anyone who had the price of a pack and could reach the counter was old enough to buy tobacco? The law against sales to minors has not been enforced.
Those days should be gone, thanks to new U.S. Food and Drug Administration rules that require stores to check the photo I.D. of anyone under 27 buying tobacco products. Many 16-year-olds look 18 or older, but it will be the rare teen-ager who looks like he's pushing 30. The rule crushes the "duh, I couldn't tell" defense.
This is a good thing, notwithstanding Americans' natural bristling at rules that try to control their habits. Teen-agers are too young to have the freedom to choose to become addicted. And, at an age when it is natural to rebel, to feel invulnerable and to begin setting their own standards of behavior, teens are easy targets for tobacco marketers.
The endearingly straight-shooting McNulty acknowledged as much as he lamented his expected loss of business: "There's a lot of kids out there. That's the market the cigarette industry was catering to, primarily." Come August, he expects, he'll have to take down all the tobacco advertising in his shop when more FDA rules go into effect.
Some of those rules regulate the content and placement of advertising, and almost certainly violate the Constitution's First Amendment guarantee of free speech. They should be discarded.
Laws against selling cigarettes to minors require no such trade-off, however. They should be enforced. Though the task may seem hopeless to Virginians, it is not: States with active compliance programs do make progress.
Florida tries to check at least a third of its cigarette retailers each year. Each year, compliance with the law goes up. Massachusetts communities that push enforcement have seen compliance jump to 76 percent from 30 percent, the Tobacco Control Program reports.
Both states have far to go. To effectively thwart sales to minors, compliance should be 85-90 percent. But these states have made a good start - unlike Virginia, where federal rules are unwelcome but not unnecessary.
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