It seems to always take Mississippi a while to embrace changes that would help improve the health of people in this state. Last week, a House committee summarily rejected a proposal to raise the legal age to buy cigarettes and other tobacco products from 18 to 21.
The chairman of that committee trotted out the age-old argument that if a person is old enough to serve in the military, he is old enough to have his smokes, dadgum it.
It was the same argument that was made during the 1980s when raising the legal drinking age to 21 was being debated. Mississippi adopted that change in 1986 largely because of the threat that it would lose 10 percent of its federal highway funding if it didn’t.
It is ironic to tie military service to smoking rights, given the history of the tobacco industry and our armed forces. Before the U.S. surgeon general in the 1970s definitively linked smoking with cancer, heart disease and other serious ailments, it was in the military where many young adults, especially men, picked up the life-shortening habit. Cigarette companies plied the armed forces with cigarettes, giving them away free during World War II and persuading the military to include them in a soldier’s rations for about three decades. The connection was portrayed as patriotic, as a business’ charitable effort to lighten the emotional and mental hardships of war. What it was, though, was a marketing strategy designed to create a sure supply of customers who, when they got out of the service, would be addicted to a product that they would continue to buy.
What’s been well-documented by the anti-tobacco forces is that most addiction to nicotine takes place during the teenage years. If a person can make it to his early 20s without smoking, the chances are slim of ever picking up the habit.
The reason smoking usually starts in the teen years is because the brain is not fully developed then, so even young adults don’t process well the risks involved with hazardous behavior. They either don’t think they will get addicted to cigarettes or they don’t care if they do because cancer, emphysema or a heart attack down the road is not something they worry much about.
It’s also why teenagers are the most prone to have automobile accidents, binge drink and have unprotected sex. They think they’re invincible.
When does the government have a responsibility to try to protect them from their bad decisions? That is a philosophical argument that people have had for decades.
The reason that the drinking age was raised to 21, besides the hammer held over the state’s head by Washington, was the issue of drunk driving. The public sentiment that ultimately prevailed said that your personal right to drink and drive ends with my personal right not to be maimed or killed by you.
Smoking is a little trickier, because the correlation between those who smoke and the risks to those who don’t are not as linear. Still, the scientifically documented dangers of secondhand smoke have supported efforts to steadily reduce the number of public places where they can light up.
Again, though, this is an area where the Legislature is behind the curve. Although the number of local governments that have enacted smoking bans is now nearing 150 in Mississippi, lawmakers continue to refuse to adopt a statewide ban.
Eventually, most of these anti-smoking initiatives will happen, even if Mississippi drags up the rear. The smokers are simply outnumbered. Whereas almost half of U.S. adults smoked a half-century ago, the number is now down to less than 1 in 6.
Non-smokers will steadily be converted to the idea that there’s nothing wrong with making it harder for the tobacco companies to make a profit off of others’ misery.
Four states have already raised the legal smoking age to 21, and three others, including neighboring Alabama, have set it at 19.
Of course, a higher age won’t stop underage smoking, as even today there are plenty of kids who start experimenting with cigarettes well before the age of 18. It will, though, make it less convenient to get started, and thus contribute to further progress against the most preventable cause of death in the United States.
Besides, for all this talk about smokers’ rights, you’d be hard-pressed to find any who didn’t wish they had never started the habit.
Making smoking more expensive through higher taxes, making it less convenient through public smoking bans, and raising the legal age for buying tobacco products would do a lot of young people a lifetime favor, even if they are too immature to realize it.
Contact Tim Kalich at 581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
