Editor’s note: The author is a project coordinator with the Capital District Tobacco-Free Coalition.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently announced a series of measures to further reduce youth smoking, generating a flurry of national attention. One of the proposals takes aim at a leading contributor to youth tobacco use – young people’s exposure to tobacco marketing.
New York state is a national leader in reducing the incidence of youth tobacco use. We boast the highest tax in the nation on tobacco products, the single most effective way to discourage young people from smoking. New York was an early adopter of strong clean indoor air laws, further contributing to a decrease in smoking rates among middle and high school students over the past decade to a level significantly lower than the national average.
That’s all good news for New York’s kids. But for the 12.6 percent of high school students who currently smoke and the 21,000 youth under the age of 18 who are predicted to start this year – one third of whom will die prematurely from tobacco use – we need to do more.
Every year in New York state, 25,400 adults die of smoking-caused diseases. That’s 25,400 fewer customers every year that tobacco companies need to “replace” with new smokers in order to stay profitable. The problem is that 90 percent of first-time smokers are under the age of 18 – not even old enough to legally use tobacco – and 99 percent are under age 26. If you don’t become a “new customer” of tobacco products by age 26, you almost certainly never will.
So when tobacco companies spend more than $1 million per day in New York state to promote their products in retail stores, the audience they’re reaching is young people who are too young to legally smoke and too young to fully appreciate the dangers of tobacco use and addiction.
Tobacco product displays, on average, take up 34 square feet of space in the most visible location in stores – directly behind the checkout counter. In pharmacies the displays are even larger, consuming as much as 50 square feet. Nonsmoking adults may not even notice these displays, but kids do. As tobacco industry documents note, “Eye level is buy level.” Kids see, they notice, and they remember. And the more tobacco marketing kids see, the more likely they are to smoke, a fact highlighted in the U.S. Surgeon General’s most recent report on “Preventing Tobacco Use Among Youth and Young Adults.”
The Capital District Tobacco-Free Coalition is one of 33 community partners statewide working to decrease the harmful effects of tobacco marketing on young people. Many countries throughout the world (including Canada, England and Australia) have already made significant progress and their successes encourage us to pursue the following solutions.
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Cover up tobacco products in retail stores. Covering up tobacco is easy, inexpensive and it works to reduce the youth smoking rate.
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End the sale of tobacco in pharmacies. No doctor would ever prescribe tobacco. So why do pharmacies sell it? As the face of neighborhood healthcare, there is no place for tobacco products in pharmacies.
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Do not allow tobacco retailers to be located near schools. There is currently one tobacco retailer for every 194 children in New York State with far too many of them located in close proximity to schools.
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Reduce the number of tobacco retailers overall. The higher the number of tobacco retailers in a particular area, the higher the smoking rate of adults and teens. Reducing the number of tobacco retailers in communities that currently have a particularly high number would help reduce the impact of tobacco marketing and subsequently, the smoking rate.
If you’ve seen enough tobacco marketing to kids, there are lots of ways you can help. Visit www.SmokeFreeCapital.org to learn how.