Chicago raises the smoking age to 21 in California’s footsteps
graphic by Joseph Molino
March 29, 2016
Chicago aldermen have approved raising the smoking age to 21. Not only does this include tobacco, but vaping and smokeless tobacco use also. Although this is a major change in policy, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration has had a strong hand in cracking down on tobacco use in Chicago.
Chicago isn’t the first major city or locality to raise the smoking age to 21. The city joined more than 100 U.S. localities in this movement, which include Cleveland, OH; Boston, MA; New York City, Hawaii and more recently California.
Along with this new measure, the city council approved new tax increases on miscellaneous tobacco products. Cigars will now cost 20 cents more. Smokeless and smoking tobacco have increased by $1.80 per ounce. And fans of pipe tobacco will pay 60 cents more per ounce.
This new legislation also banned smokeless tobacco use in all Chicago stadiums, and prohibits the use of coupons and discounts for tobacco products.
This isn’t the first time Chicago lawmakers have made smoking a more expensive activity. In November of last year, the Emanuel administration decided to raise the Chicago tax on e-cigarette e-juice with nicotine to 55-cents per milliliter starting in May 2016. As well, Cook County will raise their e-juice with nicotine tax to 20-cents per milliliter starting at the same time. You can find more information on this here.
His administration has also recently cracked down on businesses for selling tobacco products illegally. A press release on cityofchicago.org on March 11 stated that the Chicago tobacco enforcement units have found 192 violations that resulted in the confiscation of 797 unstamped packs of cigarettes.
The units confiscate unstamped packs because the 1978 Contraband Cigarette Act prohibits the sale of cigarettes without the official tax stamp of the state where the seller is located.
Chicago Public Health Commissioner Dr. Julie Morita applauds this movement coming to Chicago. She was a strong advocate for following in the footsteps of the other localities.
In an interview with CBS Chicago, she stated, “Today, we’re about to be one step closer to creating Chicago’s first tobacco-free generation, where countless children throughout Chicago have the opportunity to have a life free from addiction and from a destructive habit that will shorten their lives.”
Tim Jenson • Mar 30, 2016 at 1:17 am
Lawmakers are misguided and are basing this off assumptions that aren’t correct, and that is specifying that people are addicted to nicotine, rather than cigarette smoke. It has been demonstrated that nicotine in the context of cigarette smoke (and the thousands of other chemicals present) is in fact addictive. Yet there is little to no scientific literature showing that nicotine is addictive outside of cigarette smoke. Nicotine is present naturally in many commonly eaten vegetables. In some cases, the content is fairly high. I like eggplant parm, but don’t consider myself to have a dependence on them. There is also no evidence of never smokers becoming addicted to nicotine in patches, and they have been administered as part of fairly recent clinical trials exploring the effect of nicotine on Parkinson’s patients. NEWSFLASH: the nicotine in patches is identical to the nicotine in vapor products.
Perhaps this is a topic should be revisited. A recent “landmark review” by Public Health England assessed vapor products to be at least 95% less harmful than smoking. There is plenty more independent scientific evidence to show these products are magnitudes less harmful than smoking. For anyone even remotely interested in this topic, this literature is impossible to miss. That raises the question how someone positioning themselves as an “expert” could miss it, or discount it out of hand.
I see this type of thing frequently, and am usually surprised (even when it comes from a University in a major tobacco producing state). It always strikes me as an effort to protect cigarette markets or advance some unseen agenda. In light of the fact that over 1300 Americans die every day (and usually horribly) as a result of cigarette addiction, it’s hard for me to imagine someone showing outright opposition to a disruptive technology that holds the potential to greatly reduce, or possibly even eliminate all that death and suffering.
It is indisputable that US smoking rates have “coincidentally” collapsed to their lowest levels since records have been kept, at the same exact time that vapor products have grown in use. There have been no earth shattering new cessation products or technologies introduced in that same period to account for that collapse. I’m not clear on how anyone could be against that unless driven by one agenda or another.
It’s very interesting to note that the rationale behind the proposals is not evidence of any harm, rather citing the ‘concerns of the vast majority of people’, without any evidence of numbers involved. More disturbingly, how many measures are based solely on popularity with the public? this would be the death knell for any minority if that was the case.
Nicotine once again is demonized, with the nonsensical quote ”to fight the powerful addiction to nicotine’ ‘when not associated with traditional tobacco cigarettes nicotine is mildly dependence forming akin to caffeine.
Don’t take my word for it see Etter + Eissenberg (world experts on this subject)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu…
Also Professor John Britton (Royal College of Surgeons etc)
http://thorax.bmj.com/content/…
The last line of the letter is the giveaway here. ‘Social + Educational pressure alone is not enough it also requires clinical, regulatory + economic measures.
1) Clinical: – Supposedly some evidence may be good here eg https://www.gov.uk/government/…
2)Regulatory: – Why not wait for the FDA? or failing that an informed discussion rather than regulating via ignorance and prejudice