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Monrovia Weekly Jul 01, 2015
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Do you think kids in Monrovia are buying cigarettes? According to the 2014 California Healthy Kids Survey, 31 percent of Monrovia 11th-graders reported that it is very easy to purchase cigarettes. In fact, 11 percent of female 11th-graders in Monrovia had smoked cigarettes during the past 30 days of the survey!
In February of this year, adult and youth members of the Monrovia Coalition to Reduce Teen Smoking completed a Youth Tobacco Purchase Survey. The survey revealed that 11 out of 26 tobacco retailers in the City of Monrovia were willing to sell tobacco products to minors, giving this city an illegal sales rate of 42.3 percent. Seven of those retailers were within walking distance of a school. Monrovia’s illegal sales rate is much higher than that in most Los Angeles County cities. This is a disturbing statistic, particularly considering that it has been illegal to sell tobacco to youth under the age of 18 for more than 100 years. The long-term health of our children is being put in jeopardy, in part, because local retailers face no consequence for breaking the law. It is obvious that a better policy solution is needed.
Tobacco, like alcohol, is an age-restricted product and for good reason: nicotine is a well-known addictive substance and can trap young smokers within weeks or just days after “youthful experimentation”. For decades, the U.S. Surgeon General Reports have repeatedly concluded that smoking is the single greatest cause of avoidable disease and death in the United States. (U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare [USDHEW] 2004). Smoking harms nearly every organ of the body, causing many diseases and reducing the health of smokers in general. Cigarettes are recognized by physicians and medical researchers as causing lung cancer and other forms of cancer. They are associated with heart disease, stroke, and pulmonary diseases, such as pneumonia and C.O.P.D. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that the younger people are when they start smoking, the more difficult it is for them to quit.
It is a tragic fact that, according to the CDC, one-third of youth smokers will eventually die prematurely from smoking-related illnesses. Tobacco control measures that prevent smoking initiation among the young are urgently needed. Current measures do not address the problem of illegal sales to youth, and state laws do not include the resources needed to provide effective enforcement against illegal sales. Local enforcement of tobacco laws has been proven as an effective solution to reduce youth access to tobacco in many communities. For example, after the implementation of a local tobacco retail licensing (TRL) program in La Cañada Flintridge, illegal sales to youth dropped from 47 percent to 0 percent! After a strong TRL policy was established in Pasadena, the rate of illegal tobacco sales to minors dropped from 19 percent to 5 percent and then to 0 percent.
Preventing illegal sales of tobacco to children requires strict enforcement measures and meaningful penalties, especially for those retailers who continually break the law. The Monrovia Coalition to Reduce Teen Smoking supports this effort, and a public opinion survey of 550 Monrovia residents found that 75 percent of respondents favor a law requiring Monrovia retailers to have a city-issued license to sell tobacco. 77 percent of respondents believe that retailers who continue to sell tobacco to youth should have their license revoked. Local regulation of tobacco sales is a vital step we must take to protect Monrovia’s youth from a life-long addiction to this deadly product. For more information, you may contact our coalition at Guadulesa.Rivera@ah.org.
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