ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, February 23, 1996 TAG: 9602230099
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A8 EDITION: METRO
That would bring you up out of your chair at the breakfast table, we'd wager.
We imagine the reaction was considerably more subdued to an actual headline, "Age limit on smoking 'disregarded'," which ran on a recent item in this newspaper's "What's On Your Mind?" column.
No, Freddie Krueger isn't loose in the Roanoke Civic Center. But another sort of killer is blandly tolerated in our midst.
A reader had asked columnist Ray Reed why police and security people allow children to smoke, unchallenged, in the hallways at the Roanoke Civic Center. The gist of the reply was that, although state law prohibits the purchase or possession of tobacco products by anyone younger than 18, the law is not widely enforced.
That's a problem.
About 3,000 children take up smoking every day - every day - in this country, and about a third of them are expected to die one day of smoking-related illnesses. Smoking promises to cut decades from the lives of many who become addicted to tobacco.
And what better time to get future customers hooked than during the rebellious teen years? Nowadays, most people who don't start smoking in those years never do.
We believe an attempted ban on cigarettes would accomplish little more than to make criminals of lots of law-abiding citizens. Censorship of advertising can conflict with freedom of speech. And trying to regulate nicotine like any other drug would beg the question of its efficacy for anything besides addiction and disease.
No, education, encouragement to quit and protection from secondhand smoke are the best that can be done for adults.
Children, however, present a different case. Virginia needs to crack down on sales of cigarettes to minors, including going after store clerks and banning vending-machine sales.
It will be more difficult to consistently enforce the possession rule, but that's not to say it can't sometimes be enforced - by security guards or police. A little action in obvious cases would send a message in healthy contrast to the pitch that kids are getting from the tobacco merchants.
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