The Record

Raise legal smoking age

By: Eric K. Pye Jr.

In American society, we place a premium on the health of our citizens, especially our youth. This has been evident in both our recent political health care reform as well as our history of restrictions and criminalization of substances which are viewed as detrimental to our health.

In accordance with this, I propose that the legal age to purchase tobacco products be raised from 18 to 21-years-old nation-wide in the United States.

The significance of the number 21 is that most smokers start in adolescence before the age of 18, and according to an article in the CQ Researcher, “If young people make it to age 20 without lighting up, the odds are overwhelming they will never take up smoking, which is why anti-smoking campaigns focus on youngsters.”

The problem as it stands today, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), is, “Every day nearly 4,000 kids under 18 try their first cigarette and 1,000 kids under 18 become daily smokers. Many of these kids will become addicts before they are old enough to understand the risks and will ultimately die too young of tobacco-related diseases.”

This means that the current age restrictions are not working.

If every day we have a new set of 4,000 kids who have a 1-in-4 chance of being an addict, then that means we should limit their access to this drug for a longer period of time in order to reduce that risk.

It makes more sense to me that it would be easier for a 16-year-old high school junior to get cigarettes from an 18-year-old senior who he goes to school with, than from a 21-year-old junior or senior in a college.

In essence, raising the legal smoking age shrinks the pool of enablers around those we especially don’t want to smoke: children. My proposal isn’t so far-fetched. In fact, both lawmakers in Oregon and Connecticut have proposed such a bill in recent years. The legal age to buy tobacco products is 19 in Alabama, Alaska and Utah, as well as various counties around the U.S.

The reasoning behind these laws and proposed laws is the Health and Human Services’ (HSS) finding that almost 90 percent of cigarette smokers started at or before age 18 and they understand that the further away from that under-18 mark is a better chance they won’t become addicts in the future.

My proposal to raise the legal age to purchase tobacco products from 18 to 21 isn’t so much to protect the general public from secondhand smoke. It’s to stop the creation of new young smokers.

There won’t be a need to ban it in public places if there are fewer new smokers. I am not naïve in thinking that just because someone hasn’t reached 21 that a law will stop him or her from smoking or using tobacco if he or she is set on doing it.

What I propose is simply another way to limit access to these addictive products, which will undoubtedly aid in decreasing the percentage of kids who become daily users and will eventually decrease the number of young people under 18 smoking in the first place. This is all an effort to make America and its citizens healthier in the future. One of the best ways to do that is to ensure that current and future generations of young people are not addicted to a product that makes them unhealthy.

This is the opinion of Eric K. Pye Jr., an SJU senior.

---