From the Associate editor
A growing number of US cities and states have raised the legal age to buy tobacco products to 21. Many other places are at various stages of getting this passed into legislation. The reason behind this is to prevent, or at least curb, young people from smoking.
Playing a crucial role to this growing trend is the catchy-named Tobacco 21 campaign, or T21, which was created and funded by the Preventing Tobacco Addiction Foundation. The campaign takes a local approach to raising the minimum tobacco sales age from 18 to 21 across the US and American territories.
One can assume that the magical number 21 was chosen based on the legal sales age for alcohol. The Tobacco 21 website explains the reasoning as, “The younger the buyer is, the less likely they are to achieve a purchase even with current shoddy enforcement. Moreover, most social sources of tobacco for teens are themselves younger than 21. Age 21 reduces initiation in younger kids and inhibits consolidation of addiction in older teens.”
A large number of health and anti-smoking bodies as well as studies have come out in support of T21. One of the most influential is the Institute of Medicine, whose 2015 report “Public Health Implications of Raising the Minimum Age of Legal Access to Tobacco Products” solidified the movement’s position when it said “ …if the MLA were raised now to 21 nationwide, there would be approximately 223,000 fewer premature deaths, 50,000 fewer deaths from lung cancer, and 4.2 million fewer years of life lost for those born between 2000 and 2019.”
We can all agree that no one condones kids smoking and that it should not be encouraged, just like we can all agree that kids shouldn’t be drinking alcohol. But, here’s the thing: do you remember how old you were when you had your first alcoholic drink, whether it was beer, whisky, wine, or whatever else rocked your boat? How many of you were actually 21 or older at the time? And how did you get your hands on that alcohol? Fake IDs, maybe? More importantly, why did you want to drink that booze so badly that you had to go through so much effort to break the law and get it?
Perhaps it was the allure of the forbidden fruit? We all know how that works.
Instead of making tobacco forbidden and by doing so giving it an instant “cool” factor, leading kids to want to smoke, there are more effective (albeit harder) ways to prevent young people from picking up smoking such as education, good parenting, setting a good example, etc. But those are all catch-phrases. That’s too difficult in today’s 3-second attention spans, with big issues solved in headline-length So putting all the effort to combat youth smoking in “T21” is probably as concise as it will be ineffective in accomplishing its goal.