Embrace Tobacco 21 as a tool to cut smoking rates

Let’s be blunt: Smoking kills. In fact, smoking and other forms of tobacco use snuff out more lives each year in this country than alcohol, AIDS, vehicle crashes, over-doses from opiates, murders and suicides combined.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, tobacco use remains by far the No. 1 cause of preventable death in the United States.

In Ohio, 20,200 people, or 30.1 percent of the state’s cancer deaths in 2017, have direct links to smoking, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Ohio, too, has the shameful distinction of much higher smoking rates than national averages. According to CDC data, 15.1 percent of high school students and 21 percent of adult Ohioans smoke regularly. That compares with only 8.1 percent of high schoolers and 14 percent of adults nationwide.

In the Mahoning Valley, smoking rates remain stubbornly higher.

The Greater Youngstown region weighs in with an adult smoking rate of 32 percent, second only to the lower Appalachian region at 35.2 percent, according to an Ohio Department of Health report titled “The Burden of Smoking in Ohio.”

Clearly, cutting the rate of smoking must remain one of our nation’s, state’s and region’s most compelling public-health goals now and in the immediate future.

CITY COUNCIL TO GET PROPOSAL

Toward that end, Youngstown City Health Commissioner Erin Bishop last week announced at a public hearing at the Covelli Centre that her agency plans to ask city council to approve legislation to raise the legal age to purchase tobacco and vaping products from 18 to 21.

It would mark the first entry into the Valley of the snowballing Tobacco 21 movement. City council members should welcome that life-saving initiative with open arms.

Its primary focus – raising the legal tobacco purchasing age to 21 – already has been enacted statewide in California, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Oregon, Hawaii, Maine and Virginia. In addition, about 450 local communities – including 21 at last count in Ohio – have implemented municipal bans on under-21 sales.

No, such bans do not represent the nanny state rearing its ugly head. Rather it is one viable tool to help reverse our community’s destructive and unacceptably high smoking rate.

Raising the sales age for tobacco products to 21 nationally would lower smoking among 15-to-17-year-old teen by 25 percent, according to a report from the National Academy of Medicine.

The report also predicts raising the sales age nationally would cut overall smoking-related deaths by about 10 percent.

Despite its promise, we’re not na Øve enough to believe Tobacco 21 by itself would rapidly and drastically cut Ohio’s high smoking rates.

Enforcement would be a challenge. According to Bishop’s proposal, the ban would not include criminal penalties The city would have no authority to fine or charge youth customers or store employees. Instead, store owners would face civil fines of up to $500 under the proposal, she said.

In addition, raising the legal age to purchase tobacco would be no panacea in and of itself.

State and local health departments must also continue to expand education, awareness and smoking cessation programs with particularly strong outreach to urban areas where smoking rates tend to trend much higher than average.

Such multi-pronged offensives have shown early signs of success in stemming the high tide of opiate abuse and overdose deaths.

Though tobacco remains legal and its devastating effects drag out over years and decades, parallels can be drawn between opiate use and cigarette smoking.

Cycle of addiction

Tobacco, too, quickly ensnares its users into a costly and unhealthy cycle of overwhelming addictive behavior.

Tobacco, like opiates, takes a tremendous toll on health-care costs and worker productivity losses. And tobacco addiction, like drug addiction, shows no signs of disappearing from the landscape anytime soon.

That’s why Youngstown and other communities in the Valley must grasp at any and all available tools to rein in the epidemic. Tobacco 21 clearly is one of those tools.

As Wendy Hyde, the Ohio and Michigan regional director for the Preventing Tobacco Addiction Foundation, aptly points out about the Youngstown proposal: “It’s a life-saving ordinance.”