President Trump signed into law a new provision to amend federal legislation to prohibit the sale of tobacco products to anyone under 21 on Dec. 20, 2019.
The law is a revision to the existing Food and Drug Administration guidelines for the age of sale regarding tobacco products, and according to USA Today, also includes e-cigarettes and vaping cartridges. The finalized rules are likely to be rolled out in the next six months, but signs have already begun appearing in convenience stores to inform customers of the changes to the law.
Raising the minimum age to buy tobacco products to 21 has been an issue with bipartisan support for years. Nineteen states plus the District of Columbia have enacted the legislation already, and the recent bill achieved support from both Republican and Democratic lawmakers. The question is not who wanted the changes but why. The increase to the minimum age has been influenced by several factors.
For one, smoking remains the leading cause of preventable death from lung cancer in the U.S. The government has required state and local authorities to exercise some control over minors having access to tobacco since the 1950s, but efforts to control the use of tobacco by minors (and therefore limit the smoking population) have been ratcheted up in recent decades. In 1964, the U.S. Surgeon General published a public report linking smoking to lung cancer and bronchitis. By 1992, the federal government had mandated that all states adopt a minimum 18 years of age statute for tobacco purchases. The fight to control tobacco use among minors was expanded again in 2010 when the Obama Administration put regulation of tobacco products under the specific purview of the FDA, a move that led to a tightening of the restrictions on advertisement of such products to minors.
For their diligence, federal and state authorities have seen smokers as a percentage of the population, especially among young men and women, decline precipitously since the 1970s.
In more recent years, anti-smoking activists point to the rising prominence of e-cigarettes and vaping as a danger to public health. At first, these concerns were met with boredom by the general public, but during the summer and fall of 2019 cases of lung injury associated with e-cigarettes and vaping began to be reported.
As of Dec. 27, the Centers for Disease Control purports to have confirmed 2,561 cases of hospitalization across the 50 states and Washington D.C. with 55 deaths.
It was under these conditions that the White House and Congress seemed eager to act. The Trump Administration had, a few days prior, floated the idea of a total ban on flavored e-cigarette cartridges but after listening to industry concerns settled on raising the age limit instead. While some activists are still agitating for a ban on flavored cartridges, raising the age limit may, in the long run, have a more pronounced effect on public health.
After all, current efforts mirror the increase in the legal age for drinking, which was raised to 21 in 1984. According to the CDC, that initiative saw motor vehicle crashes reduced by a median of 16% and drinking among those aged 18-25 decreased by over 20% from 1985 to 1991.
Given the danger of smoking and vaping and the relative success of raising the minimum drinking age in lowering drinking, this writer is tentatively inclined to embrace the new law if only because it is no doubt a concrete step towards the elimination of smoking which is not only a threat to the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans but is also a significant burden on public health. This is hopefully the endgame, so to speak, for the Trump Administration and subsequent governments.
Many are inclined to decry these new regulations as yet a further encroachment of the federal government into the lives of its citizens, a point I concede. I do not think, however, that it is so harmful for a state to want to exercise its power in the interest of defending its citizenry from what is obviously a grave social evil.
It is often the case that the government oversteps its bounds in places where it should not, introducing great harm in the process, and which sours the opinion of the public against the exercise of power when it is used towards a righteous end. The energies of anti-regulatory activists are best spent in those trenches and not as proxy warriors for the tobacco industry.
Likewise, there is the standard question which is often tossed around during these debates, ‘If I am old enough to join the military, shouldn’t I be old enough to smoke a cigarette?’ To restate the question more plainly: because I am old enough to do something virtuous and honorable, aren’t I old enough to do something that is foolish? Perhaps, but it is not the vested interest of the state to maintain your right to be foolish.
Nevertheless, the recent legislation does present America with a social problem that has not as of yet been solved, namely when a person is an adult. The questions of whether someone can legally smoke or drink, while usually framed in scientific terms, are still questions about what it is to be an adult and what the social ramifications of the answer are.
In a context in which psychologists and other officials of modern social theory are advocating the extension of adolescence well into a person’s 20s, it is no wonder that the rhetoric and legislative force of government has become increasingly maternal.
Therefore, if a person truly cared about infringements on liberties of this kind, they might do well to examine the cultural biases we have created that portray an age group once considered the first rung of adulthood as part of an extended adolescence.
