Faced with the alarming statistic that 33 percent of our stores
that sell tobacco products sold them to minors, and faced with the
fact that local police put a low priority on enforcing the smoking
age law, Human Services Project Director Samela Perez had an
idea.
Faced with the alarming statistic that 33 percent of our stores that sell tobacco products sold them to minors, and faced with the fact that local police put a low priority on enforcing the smoking age law, Human Services Project Director Samela Perez had an idea.
She proposed that businesses selling tobacco buy a license to do so. The license fees would help pay for sting operations to keep vendors honest, and if the vendors got busted selling cigarettes to minors they would have their license revoked and could not sell tobacco within city limits.
Presumably, the next step would be that tobacco wholesalers would get a list of the stores out of compliance and would not deliver products to those establishments.
We’d like to see Perez’s ideas become a reality. The Hollister City Council and the San Benito County Supervisors should make it happen.
It’s hardly unprecedented. Forty-two cities and counties in California have already adopted such ordinances. In a county where an underage smoker can walk into many stores and come away with a pack of cigarettes, and where the police say they can’t devote the time and resources to enforcing the law, something must be done.
After all, the primary role of government is protect the health and welfare of its citizens. There is no doubt that smoking is devastating to an individual’s health and costly to our society. Take a look at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s statistics:
n An estimated 8.6 million people in the United States have at least one serious illness caused by smoking
n Each year, nearly 440,000 people in the United States die of a smoking-related illness, resulting in 5.6 million years of potential life lost and $92 billion in lost productivity from smoking
We as a county should not be satisfied with answers like Sheriff Curtis Hill’s, who said he and his deputies “are not the smoking police,” or the fact that Hollister Police Chief says his prevention program has been cut because of limited resources and higher priorities like gang intervention. We must do something to prevent minors from picking up cigarettes, and Perez’s proposal would work.
