BY SAUNDRA AMRHEIN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
NORWOOD -- As the nation struggles to keep kids away from Joe Camel, local health officials say cigarettes are right at their fingertips.
More than one out of three Hamilton County stores or restaurants targeted in a recent sting illegally sold cigarettes or other tobacco products to young people under 18, officials with the Norwood Health Department and the Hamilton County General Health District announced Thursday.
The two agencies paired up under the direction of the Ohio Health Department and sent 10 volunteer students ages 14-17 from Norwood High School into the stores three days in early June.
Throughout the county, 34 percent -- or 41 of 120 -- of the convenience stores, restaurants or bars randomly chosen sold tobacco products to the students. Some store employees never asked for identification, while others looked the other way as youthful customers pulled packs from vending machines, students said.
Norwood H.S. student Kim Mills, 15, explains how she was able to buy cigarettes at a state liquor store.
(Glenn Hartong photo)
|
ZOOM |
|
Health officials called the findings "alarming."
"There's no excuse for merchants to ignore their responsibilities," said Timothy Ingram, health commissioner for the Hamilton County General Health District.
Random checks like this one "may prevent our children from becoming a health statistic in the future," he said.
Mr. Ingram urged merchants to better train employees to follow federal regulations, which call for employees to check identification of tobacco customers appearing under age 27 and prohibit the sale of those products to anyone under 18.
Fifteen of the sales to the Norwood students took place at convenience stores or gas stations, while some of the highest rates of illegal sales were at restaurant or bowling alley vending machines, which are supposed to be monitored by adults at all times, officials said. County health officials want to cut the 34 percent "non-compliance" rate in half to 17 percent, Mr. Ingram said. The state's goal is 24 percent.
A similar survey of stores done in Butler County through the Middletown Health Department produced an 18 percent sales rate, said Kristy Duritsch, Middletown's health programs administrator. Warren and Clermont counties have not conducted surveys.
Violating stores will be warned but not cited this time around, Mr. Ingram said. Offenders can be fined $250 or sentenced to 30 days in jail if caught selling cigarettes to minors. The second time, they can be fined $500 or sent to jail for 60 days.
Ongoing surveys on teen access to cigarettes are crucial and need to become part of the national debate, said Donna Laake, Norwood's health commissioner.
The survey results come a day after the death of the tobacco bill in the U.S. Senate. The bill would have raised $516 billion over 25 years. Among other things, that money would have been spent on an anti-smoking ad campaign aimed at teen-agers. The bill also would have restricted the tobacco industry's ability to advertise to minors.
Children have quickly become a focus in the swirling tobacco debate sweeping the nation as activists seek to uncover the industry's methods of capturing young customers.
"All of the research indicates most people start smoking before the age of 20, and if they don't start by then, chances are they won't," said Joel Spivak, spokesman for the Washington-based Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, a non-profit public health organization.
Mr. Spivak lamented the failure of the bill and the earlier removal of $2.5 billion a year from it that would have partially gone to police departments to enforce the restricted sale of cigarettes to minors. Now that responsibility lies with public health officials, as law enforcement agencies are strapped with more pressing problems.
"It would be a low priority from our standpoint," said Col. Dan Wolfangel, spokesman for the Hamilton County sheriff's office. "Our people are basically inundated with calls responding to crimes against persons and property."
Meanwhile, some stores are taking matters into their own hands. Kroger, the largest retail grocery chain in the nation and in the Cincinnati area, has begun locking up cigarette cartons and packs to prevent teens from stealing them.
Already, 52 of its 95 stores in the Cincinnati and Dayton division have been equipped with locked cabinets since late last month, said division spokesman Steve Jagers. The remainder will be outfitted by the end of July.
"There is concern about minors and tobacco everywhere," he said. "The concern is if they are not allowed to buy them, they will find other ways to obtain them. This is done in the hopes of reducing chances of them buying or stealing them."
That's exactly what young teens will start doing, predicted Eric Robinson, 19, of Reading, with a Marlboro hanging out of his mouth.
He started smoking at 13 because all his other friends were doing it, said Mr. Robinson, sitting on a curb after summer school outside Norwood High School. "I would bum them off friends or older people would buy them for me," he said.
Negative advertising or raising the cost of cigarettes, as the proposed tobacco bill threatened to do, won't stop teen-agers or anyone else from smoking, he said.
Young people will resort to a black market or steal them, he said. Even pictures of diseased lungs and people with emphysema didn't dissuade 20-year-old Mike Bowen from taking up smoking when he was 14. Like many of his peers, Mr. Bowen, of Norwood, also received cigarettes from older friends. The habit took off from that point.
"I tried it, I liked it and I couldn't stop," he said.
