Editorial: Legislature stamping out teen tobacco sales

Young people may soon have to be three years less-stupid to buy cigarettes.|

“I got a baby’s brain and an old man’s heart” – Alice Cooper, “Eighteen”

Young people may soon have to be three years less-stupid to buy cigarettes.

At least that’s how it looks according to the smoke signals rising from Sacramento, where the state Assembly on March 3 passed ABx2-8, a bill which would raise the minimum age to purchase tobacco products from 18 to 21. The bill, co-authored by Healdsburg Assemblyman Jim Wood, is expected to be considered by the state Senate this week and, if it passes, would go to Gov. Brown’s desk to await his signature. A separate, but hardly coincidental, bill to ensure e-cigarette products are regulated as tobacco products recently passed the State Senate. It appears the days of lawful teen smoke sales in California are headed to the scaffold – and if they want a last cigarette, they’ll have to flash some ID.

Wood’s name on the bill is no shocker. He was on the Healdsburg City Council just two years ago when the town raised the minimum tobacco purchasing age from 18 to 21. It was a groundbreaking move, and a grounds-breaking move, all at once. And a short-lived one at that. Last October, Healdsburg backed off the ordinance under threat of a lawsuit by the retail-tobacco lobby. Other cities, including Sonoma, have considered a similar age increase in puff-purchasing policy, but have tended to back away from the move when faced with the quandary that local ordinances can’t supersede established state law. A few of the more daring city councils – such as Healdsburg, Santa Cruz and, recently, San Francisco – have simply gone with their gut, and raised the age anyway. Though now, it seems, when it comes to discouraging teen smoking, that problem may be as irrelevant to local municipalities as Pitti Immagine Uomo is to the Marlboro Man.

But hold on a second! Don’t defenders of semi-arbitrary ages of permissiveness have a false-equivalency argument to make which holds that being old enough to vote for President implies a sound-enough mind to foresee Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease 30 years on?

Sadly, no. At least not according to that vile bedeviller of baseless perspective: science.

Apparently, modern neuroscientific theory holds that the human brain doesn’t reach full maturity until age 25. And if one considers the development of the adult brain to begin at the onset of puberty – that means 18-year-olds are about halfway to rational adult thought when society gives them the green light to start filling their lungs with dozens of carcinogens every couple of hours.

According to neuroscientist Sandra Aamodt, our prefrontal cortexes aren’t yet developed at 18 – that’s the part of the brain, she says, that warns a person, “Hey, this might not be such a great idea, after all.”

“(It’s the section of) the brain that helps you to inhibit impulses and to plan and organize your behavior to reach a goal,” Aamodt, author of “Welcome to Your Child’s Brain,” told NPR in 2011. Perhaps one of the “goals” 18-year-olds grapple to understand is: How to live a long and healthy life.

A 2005 study by researchers at the University of Dartmouth titled “Anatomical Changes in the Emerging Adult Brain” was even more direct in its supposition after comparing the brains of college freshmen with those of grad students in their mid-20s. Specifically, according to Dartmouth officials, the older students’ were far more developed in “the areas that take information from our current body state and apply it for use in navigating the world.”

In other words: Teens don’t make good decisions.

So why 21? Why not 25? Well, at that age, the bill probably wouldn’t pass. The 21 minimum was approved by the Assembly by a vote of 46-26 – hardly close, but hardly a slam dunk. Besides, 21 is nearly a magic number when it comes to preventing life-long smoking habits.

According to a 2015 report from the Institute of Medicine, 95 percent of adult smokers began smoking before age 21. In fact, 46 percent of adult smokers had been daily smokers before age 18. Yet, 80 percent had been daily smokers before 21.

That means 34 percent of adults smokers became habitual smokers between age 18 and 21.

There’s a lot of preventable lung cancer at stake here.

But what about 18-year-olds’ right to make their own decisions – even if they’re bad ones? After all, they can vote and enlist, right?

Aamodt dismisses that argument, saying “it makes sense to have different ages for different functions.”

“Obviously some 18-year-olds are competent to go out into the world and handle things by themselves and some of them aren’t,” Aamodt said. “It would be nice if we had a little more flexibility to distinguish the two in the legal system.”

Email Jason at jason.walsh@sonomanews.com.

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