Prevention
Ninety percent of smokers started as teens. In South Carolina, one in every five high-school aged youth is a current smoker. Twenty-one percent of middle school students who have ever tried smoking did so before age 11. Another 7,300 South Carolina children become addicted smokers every year.
View 2006 South Carolina Tobacco Youth Survey by SC DHEC Division of Tobacco Prevention & Control.
While South Carolina’s youth (ages 12-17) smoking rate has declined in recent years, our state is seeing a steady increase in the number of young adult (18-24) smokers. We still have a long way to go to keep our kids from suffering a lifetime of addiction and disease due to tobacco use.
The Youth Access to Tobacco Prevention Act of 2006 was an important step in the right direction. The Act:
- Makes it unlawful to sell, furnish, give, distribute, purchase for, or provide a tobacco product to a minor under the age of 18 years;
- Makes it unlawful to sell a tobacco product to an individual who does not present proof of age upon demand;
- Makes it unlawful to sell a tobacco product through a vending machine, unless it is either (a) located in an establishment which is only open to individuals who are 18 or older, or (b) where the vending machine is under continuous control by the owner/licensee of the premises; and
- Makes it unlawful for a minor under the age of 18 to purchase, possess, or attempt to possess a tobacco product or present false proof of age in order to purchase a tobacco product.
While the law creates one layer in the youth prevention effort, our goal is not to criminalize young people. Rather, we would prefer to see prevention programs that help young people choose much earlier in life not to smoke in the first place.
Cigarette tax increases are proven to save lives. They make cigarettes too expensive for many kids to buy and give smokers another incentive to quit. The higher the tax, the more lives saved, especially when some of the revenue is used to fund tobacco prevention programs. Increasing the cigarette tax is a win-win-win solution for South Carolina. It is a public health win that will reduce smoking and save lives, a fiscal win that will raise needed revenue and reduce smoking-caused health care costs, and a political win because more than 71 percent of South Carolina voters support a 93-cent per pack increase if the revenue is used for healthcare, particularly smoking prevention and cessation programs. Studies show that every 10 percent increase in the price of cigarettes reduces youth smoking by about 7 percent and overall cigarette consumption by about 4 percent. A 93-cent increase will prevent 59,700 kids alive today from becoming smokers.
South Carolina allocates less than 1% of the recommendation from the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s in its Best Practices for Comprehensive Tobacco Control Programs for funding youth smoking prevention and cessation efforts. These funds are unstable and nonrecurring. The South Carolina Tobacco Collaborative advocates for increased funding via a cigarette tax increase and will continue working towards full funding of this key prevention strategy.