Unsafe at Any Age

New York City’s new law raising the smoking age from 18 to 21 is of far more than local interest. The entire country is watching.

While New York is not the first locality to enact such a law — that distinction belongs to the Boston suburb of Needham, Mass. — it will be the first tryout on a major scale.

Results in Needham are encouraging. Passed in 2005, the law bars anyone under 21 from buying tobacco products. Since then, the adult smoking rate in Needham has fallen to 56 percent lower than the overall rate in Massachusetts, according to recent findings by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.

However, the data from a town with a population of only 28,886 is insufficient to provide a basis for any definite conclusions. A bigger laboratory is needed to test the hypothesis that targeting the 18-to-21-year-old age group will make for a historic change.

Studies show that this age group is critical. According to the office of the Surgeon General, 88 percent of adult smokers began smoking before the age of 18, and 90 percent of those who purchase cigarettes for minors are between the ages of 18 and 20. If smoking at this age can be reduced, they argue, the prospect of a smoking-free life will be greatly increased. Along with it, the risks of cancer and other fatal diseases will be lowered.

Perhaps the most persuasive argument for the ban comes from within the tobacco industry itself. A 1982 internal memo at tobacco manufacturer R.J. Reynolds stated: “If a man has never smoked by age 18, the odds are three-to-one he never will. By age 24, the odds are twenty-to-one.” In the words of Patrick Reynolds, the anti-smoking grandson of R.J. Reynolds, “Once they reach 21, it’s no longer an interesting vehicle for rebellion.”

New York is not alone in its willingness to act on the evidence already available. Similar legislation is in the pipeline in Washington, D.C., New Jersey and Utah. Hawaii is expected to vote on it in December.

Furthermore, the Obama administration is required by the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act to convene an expert panel by June 2014 to study the public health implications of raising the smoking age. So far, the health-conscious administration in Washington has failed to do so. But a deadline is a deadline, and soon the push for regulating the smoking age may find its way onto the national health agenda.

While we wait for more evidence to come in, the arguments against Smoking 21, as it’s been called, are still being made:

“You can die for your country, but you can’t smoke a cigarette” is one of them. Of course, it ignores the fact that the physical demands of military service dictate that 18-year-olds should be eligible for enlistment. That has nothing to do with the proposal to safeguard those same young people from the temptations of tobacco addiction and its health-destroying consequences.

Somewhat more difficult to rebut is the comparison to the right of 18-year-olds to vote. If they are considered intelligent and mature enough to choose their mayors and presidents, why not to decide for themselves whether or not to buy a pack of cigarettes? We will leave it to Messrs. Bloomberg and de Blasio to answer that one.

There are other arguments, too: Smoking 21 opponents warn that it will drive under-21s to purchase tobacco illegally, thus compounding a public-health problem with criminality.

But this is an issue of enforcement. It will depend largely on the willingness of local merchants to comply with the law, and the vigilance of the police in keeping down the illegal venues.

They do have a point, though. America’s dismal experience with Prohibition, which put organized crime on the map by allowing it to monopolize the sale of alcoholic beverages, demonstrated the folly of enacting measures with which the public cannot live.

So it’s a good thing that this smoking regulation is being enacted on a piecemeal basis rather than across the nation all at once. If the experiment succeeds, it can be extended to other jurisdictions, and ultimately made into federal law. If it fails, rescinding it will be that much easier.

We in the Torah community should not have to wait for the new law to prove itself. The evidence that smoking is hazardous to your health and those around you is already overwhelming. That is not at issue. The only question the government is addressing here is whether making it illegal to smoke under the age of 21 will be an effective method of discouraging smoking.

It is incumbent on parents and educators to do all they can to ensure that our young people don’t get addicted to smoking. And that means not starting — at any age.

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