
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, November 21, 1994                   TAG: 9411220032
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

GETTING SMOKERS WHILE THEY'RE YOUNG

BAD NEWS for those who believe health-care costs must be brought under control, as well as those who care about public health itself: Teen-agers are smoking as much today as they did a decade ago, despite efforts to discourage them from taking up the habit.

Because smoking's impact accounts for a huge chunk of the nation's medical costs, as well as for 400,000 deaths every year, this news doesn't bode well. Not for those of us who, one way or another, must pick up the tab for smoke-related costs. Nor for young smokers who face lives of diminished health, painful disease and premature death.

The new report on teen smoking, released last week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that 19 percent of high-school seniors smoked on a daily basis in 1993, up from 17 percent in 1992 and about the same percentage as in 1984.

Public campaigns warning of smoking's dangers so far have not sufficiently countered the messages adolescents are getting from peers and from tobacco advertising icons like the cartoonish macho character Joe Camel.

Worse, the government has disgracefully avoided influencing teen-agers where it might count most: their pocketbooks.

Taxes on cigarettes - federal, state and local - remain way too low, pulling in but a tiny fraction of the social costs cigarettes incur. Shamefully, Virginia's tobacco tax is the lowest in the nation. And despite laws prohibiting sales to minors, kids still find cigarettes easier to come by than booze.

Everyone agrees - except, judging by its behavior, the tobacco industry - that youngsters should be discouraged from smoking. And it so happens that adolescents, who make up almost entirely the ranks of new smokers, are more price-sensitive than other consumers. In Canada, after cigarette taxes were raised to more than $3 per pack, the smoking rate among teens dropped by 60 percent.

A hefty cigarette-tax increase in this country - say, $2 per pack - would unquestionably help deter thousands of young people from becoming addicted. It would literally save lives.

Yet many of the same politicians who talk endlessly about restoring family values and saving children from the sins of godlessness are in cahoots with the tobacco industry's scheme to keep cigarette taxes low, so as not to dissuade new generations from getting hooked.

The tobacco industry, its lobbyists' denials notwithstanding, needs to get 'em while they're young because, as another CDC survey shows, cigarette consumption among Americans older than 18 is decreasing.

Here's a dream: that the new Republican majority in Congress, following a mandate to fix what's broken in this country, would help fix tobacco taxes for children's sake. Opinion polls suggest two-thirds of the public would favor higher cigarette taxes.

Unfortunately, with industry pals like Rep. Thomas Bliley Jr., R-Richmond, moving into leadership position even while remaining firmly in the tobacco merchants' pockets, the dream probably will go up in smoke, along with tens of thousands of lives that could be saved.

by CNB