KEYWORDS: teen brain flame flaming firey fire hair color dyeing dye smoking smoke development redhead teenage adolescent adolescence student learning education growth girl girls family puberty krtfeatures features krthealthmed krtnational national krtworld world counseling krtfamily family krthealth health krtkidhealth kid krtmentalhealth mental health therapy krt aspecto aspectos familia adolescente muchacha nina hija fuego cerebro educacion pelo roja illustration ilustracion grabado se contributor coddington kumata 2006 krt2006
By The morning I turned 18, my best friend handed me a checklist of stereotypical “adult” tasks I needed to complete by the end of the weekend: buy a lottery ticket, visit a sex shop, legally purchase spray paint, get some sort of body modification and buy a pack of cigarettes.
I figured I could kill two birds with one 7-Eleven trip, so I walked into the convenience store and asked for two scratchers and a pack of Marlboro Reds – the only brand I knew by name after seeing tops of packages peek out of friends’ backpacks.
The clerk rang up my purchases and took my cash without once asking me for any form of identification. To be honest, it took the wind out of my sails. This was supposed to be the moment where I flashed my membership card to the world of big, bad adulthood and left behind the days of being a kid! I couldn’t pull a six pack off the racks, but I could surely get some smokes. This was all I had to prove.
Cigarettes and alcohol are social staples of being an adult, but the two are offered to the population at different, arbitrary age checkpoints. There is absolutely no reason a newly 18 year old should be trusted to mess around with literal cancer sticks without regulation but not be able to order a beer at dinner.
And that, my friends, is the problem with American smoking laws. Or American drinking laws. Or both.
Last week, the California Assembly voted to raise the age of legal tobacco purchase and consumption to 21 years old, and as hypocritical as it may sound, I’m in total support of the motion.
Let’s break this down
Yes, at the age of 18, American citizens are considered legal adults. Yes, legal adults are afforded certain rights in regards to what they can and cannot do with their lives and their bodies. Yes, smoking cigarettes is a personal choice and should not be taken away from anybody.
But nobody is trying to ban cigarettes.
All the state of California is attempting to do is give our adults just a few more years to mature before starting a slow suicide, puff by puff.
Because of the three year gap between being able to legally smoke and legally drink, cigarettes have more time to get casual smokers addicted, and addicted smokers on the path to throat, lung, mouth and tongue cancer, emphysema and everyone’s favorite – smoker’s cough.
According to Save Lives California, the lobby organization backed by the American Cancer Society that pushed the bill, 95 percent of adult smokers pick up the habit before their 21st birthday. Upping the age necessary to purchase cigarettes would undeniably cut into this number.
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It’s not realistic to assume smokers under the age of 21 will magically quit and have absolutely no way to get their hands on a pack, but for those who haven’t started smoking or only do so socially, the age restriction could keep them away from falling too deep into nicotine addiction.
Now, I don’t want to bash people who smoke. There’s absolutely no reason to.
Whether they smoke to help quell anxiety, satisfy an oral fixation, curb hunger, reduce stress, have an excuse to step outside every few hours, or otherwise, consuming tobacco is their full and total right. I’ll never ask someone to put out a cigarette around me or look at them differently when I find out about their hazy little habit.
But, in the same way consuming alcohol is a regulated right, asking for similar tobacco restrictions is really not out of line.
I’m not surprised that even the legislative votes were split, with both Republicans and Democrats voting in and out of favor on the bill. And I am wholly anticipating the arguments I know will be made in the next few days – if you can enlist in the army, if you can vote, if you can live on your own, if you can file and pay taxes, you can smoke.
I could get into the issues I have with those arguments, but that would tailspin into an entirely new train of thought that I’m not trying to ride right now. All I need to say is that a statewide measure to protect the health of vulnerable young adults is a measure I will back – even if it does change some birthday traditions.
Holy smokes.
