Editorial

Raise the smoking age to 21

Posted

Everyone knows that smoking cigarettes is unhealthy. It’s a fact that smoking has immediate negative health consequences and that, over a prolonged period, it causes several different forms of cancer — including emphysema and lung and throat cancer — and interferes with blood and oxygen flow, leading to chronic coronary, circulation and vascular diseases. In short, smoking kills, painfully.

The legal minimum age at which you can buy tobacco products in Nassau County is 19. In Suffolk County and in New York City, it’s 21. The state law is less restrictive, at 18.

Scientific studies and tobacco companies’ own reports reveal that most smokers start lighting up before age 21, and that many increase from occasional to habitual use between 18 and 21. Fewer people begin smoking after 21, and those who do are less likely to become addicted.

Children ask people in their late teens to buy cigarettes for them. Andrew Hyland, Ph.D., chairman of the Department of Health Behavior at the Roswell Park Cancer Center Institute in Buffalo, says that researchers have found that 90 percent of people who purchase cigarettes for kids are under 21 themselves.

A bill has been filed in the Nassau County Legislature that would raise the minimum age to buy cigarettes, e-cigarettes and other tobacco products to 21. We support this proposal, and urge county lawmakers to pass it and the county executive to sign it into law.

Legislators Judy Jacobs, Kevan Abrahams, Siela Bynoe, Laura Curran, Dave Denenberg, Delia DeRiggi-Whitton and Carrie Solages — all Democrats — sponsor the bill, while Republicans have not acted on it. A spokeswoman for the Legislature’s majority Republicans said that Presiding Officer Norma Gonsalves “strongly believes that it is the responsibility of the State Legislature to determine a uniform, statewide age requirement for New York to prevent confusion for consumers and to properly allocate state funding for enforcement of the age restriction.”

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