originally published at BlueNC.
The DHHS group Substance and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) is crowing about the rate of retailers violating the law by selling cigarettes to juveniles being down to a new low. There is an inference here, at least in my reading of it, that this relates to juvenile smoking. That lowering this rate means less teens smoking. In fact, that is exactly how they describe it in their press release.
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration today announced that sales of tobacco to underage youth have reached all time lows under the Synar Amendment program – a federal and state partnership program aimed at ending illegal tobacco sales to minors.
Now, I highlighted the Synar Amendment because they make the case that it is responsible for the decrease in retailer violations, which leads to decreased juvenile smoking. Maybe the Synar Amendment had something to do with this, but I'll offer another opinion after the break.
From the press release, we find out what the Synar program is, kinda:
Under the regulations implementing the Synar Amendment, states and jurisdictions must report annually to SAMHSA on their retailer violation rates, which represent the percentage of inspected retail outlets that sold tobacco products to a customer under the age of 18. The amendment requires that retailer violation rates not exceed 20 percent. States and jurisdictions measure their progress through random, unannounced inspections of tobacco retailers, and SAMHSA provides technical assistance to help states comply.
So, the Bush administration wants you to believe that the drop in smoking rates is due to a law that requires states to say how many violations they've had? Now, certainly there is a stick associated with this program:
States that do not comply with the requirements set forth in the Amendment are subject to a penalty of 40 percent of their Federal Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment (SAPT) Block Grant funding.
But, that doesn't CAUSE anything. What results in a decrease in juvenile smoking is what the states do to stop it. And, what have they done that has so markedly stopped juvenile smoking?
- Making the legal age 18 in all states, that could be seen as a big deal.
- Having random inspections of sale sites (although one wonders how often this occurs, anybody?). I can't even find out who is responsible, but I'll keep digging.
And, that's it. That is how they propose that the massive reduction has occurred, a reduction from 40% to 10%. Wow, education really works. Makes you think we should be doing more sex education right?
Well, I have another possibility.
This is the decrease in retailer violations.
This is a great graph from the Seattle Post Intelligencer.
You can see here that the decrease in smoking goes right along with the increase in TAXES. Yes, folks, taxing cigarettes works.
A joint study from the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research matched price hikes with teen smoking rates over six years. They found that a 10% price increase would decrease the number of children who started to smoke between 3% and 10%, depending on their stage of smoking, such as experimentation, beginning daily smoking, or relatively heavy daily smoking.
"More states that haven't (raised taxes) should do so. This will stop tax-skirting smuggling of cigarettes from low-tax to high-tax states and discourage youth smoking," Todd said.
More.
The CDC:
The CDC report attributed the drop in cigarette use to three things:
* A 70% increase in the retail price of cigarettes between December 1997 and May 2001
* Increases in school-based efforts to prevent tobacco use
* Increases in youth exposure to both state and national mass media campaigns.
"When the tobacco companies lost the lawsuit that made them pay for the disease tobacco has caused, they passed the costs of their legal problems on to smokers, raising the cost of cigarettes out of the reach of many young people," said Ron Todd, director of tobacco control for the American Cancer Society (ACS).
This is a little-discussed fact. If you look at the increase in cost of cigarettes versus the increase in taxes, you see this.
I guess we should be thanking the tobacco companies for being so greedy, they are costing themselves right out of their key demographic - young, impressionable children.
What I hope you take away from this is simple: Cigarette tax good, Bush administration misrepresentations bad.
There is one more thing I guess, North Carolina, not in such great shape.
Today the Branch released preliminary findings from the 2003 N.C. Youth Tobacco Survey (NC YTS), which show that across North Carolina current cigarette use among middle school students (grades 6-8) has dropped 38% since 1999, from 15.0% (1999) to 11.3% (2001), and finally to 9.3% (2003) in the most recent survey. "Unfortunately, high school current cigarette use was 27.3% in the 2003 survey, which is not significantly lower than 2001 or 1999," Malek said.
Wow, I'm so happy that only 1 out of 10 MIDDLE SCHOOLERS is smoking. But, I guess it is better than the 1 out of 4 high schoolers who are on their way to a lifetime of debilitating disease.