A new study finds that to curb adult smoking, tobacco laws for the youth should be implemented in all states.
Researchers from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis found that states that had laws that enforce tobacco restrictions on the youth also have lower rates of adult smoking, especially among women. Such states also have a lower number of adult heavy smokers.
"In most states for many years, it has been illegal to sell cigarettes to people under 18, but few provisions are in place to prevent those sales," said the study's first author, Richard A. Grucza, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry in a press release. "This study shows that more restrictive policies can prevent teen smoking and be beneficial down the road."
For the study, researchers studied information collected from 1998 to 2007 from 105,519 individuals ages 18 to 34. They looked into whether these individuals had ever smoked, were smokers currently and if they were, whether they smoked more than 10 cigarettes per day. They then went on to analyze the smoking restrictions in place in states when the study participants were 17 years old.
Though it was illegal for anyone below the age of 18 to buy tobacco, Grucza and his team found that all states had different ways of implementing this law. Researchers studied nine related policies and found that states that implemented such policies made it very difficult for 17 year olds to purchase tobacco. As a result by the time these 17 year olds reached 20 years of age, they were less likely to smoke. They also reported an unusual observation which suggested that these policies on youth access to tobacco had a big impact on women but didn't seem to influence smoking rates in men.
