Just the Ticket to Fight Teen Smoking

The children responded quickly after the village board, including its lone smoker, voted to levy $25 fines on minors caught with a cigarette.

In the tiny park across from the brick village hall, youngsters gathered to light up and puff defiantly away.

But the protests were carefully timed. They occurred when the town squad car was gone from its parking place, the single on-duty officer obviously out on rounds.

For the most part, nicotine is now a furtive pleasure for the youths of Pleasant Plains. They have grown adept at sleight-of-hand, dipping into separate pockets for cigarettes and lighters, cradling burning sticks inside cupped palms, directing tendrils of blue smoke toward the ground. They walk far into fields of cornstalks that rise taller than their heads, the better to conceal their tobacco habits.

For Police Chief Michael Forsythe, who requested the ordinance, that is victory enough. “You don’t see 12- and 13-year-olds walking down the street with their cigarettes anymore,” he said.

This town, situated between the Illinois River and the state capital of Springfield, is among the most recent converts to a fast-growing movement in the fight to reduce teen tobacco use. From California to Florida, local legislators are trying something new: If the kids smoke, punish them.

Nationally, studies show 25% of high school-age children smoke--compared to 21% of adults.

Concern rises ever higher, with cigarette companies pressured to change youth-oriented ads and President Clinton urging price hikes to push the product out of teen-allowance range. It long has been illegal for anyone under 18 to purchase cigarettes, but generally the sellers were the ones prosecuted, and they are rarely caught.

Now, across large slices of America, mere possession--far easier to prove--can land a kid in trouble with the law.

The concept draws strong disapproval from many quarters. Some anti-tobacco activists chorus that the measures “blame the victim” rather than manufacturers and vendors. Some parents argue that if they let their children smoke, the police have no business interfering. Some teens contend that tickets won’t deter them and that the grown-ups are hypocrites. And in Medina County in northeast Ohio, juvenile court judges complained that smoking tickets clogged the courts.

Nonetheless, the juggernaut rolls on, with some other laws making Pleasant Plains seem downright lenient.

In California, officers from Santa Ana to Pasadena, Modesto to Los Gatos, since January have exerted statewide authority to write underage-smoking tickets that carry a $75 fine or 25 hours of community service. In North Platte, Neb., penalties approved in May range from $35 for a first offense up to $100. In Texas, a convicted teen smoker now pays as much as $250--and must attend a tobacco-awareness class or lose his driver’s license.

Smoking-ticket measures have been approved in at least five state legislatures this year and have been introduced in at least 23 others. “It’s very hot stuff in the public health world,” said Valerie Quinn, who runs the tobacco control program for the California Department of Health Services.

In training sessions to acquaint 135 police agencies with the new California law, “I was surprised to learn how many were already enforcing it,” Quinn said.

Justice officials say they are interested in these laws for reasons that range beyond mere tobacco use. The Los Angeles Police Department, for example, views the ticketing law as a crime-prevention tool, said department spokesman Michael G. Partain. “If there’s a group of kids on Hollywood Boulevard, and they stand on a corner and smoke, an officer might have just driven by in the past,” Partain said. “Now we have a reason to go talk to them and find out what else is going on.”

Added William B. Young, law director for the city of Medina: “When we’re dealing with drugs, the kids almost always started out smoking. This is a gateway situation. They may go onto marijuana and on from there.”

Politicians who introduce legislation say they hope to keep youngsters who don’t smoke from starting. “We would give children an out, an ability to resist their peers. They could say ‘it’s illegal’ or ‘I don’t want to lose my driver’s license,’ ” said Steven Feren, the mayor of Sunrise, Fla., who as a state representative co-sponsored a 1996 smoking-ticket bill. (His failed, but another version passed this year and takes effect today.)

He was surprised when some of the most fervent opposition, enough to ground his measure, came from the anti-smoking lobby.

Many activists are indeed suspicious. “The tobacco industry has long sought this,” said Paul Knepprath, assistant vice president of the American Lung Assn. of California. “It takes the attention away from their marketing tactics which aim to addict children.”

Thomas Lauria, a spokesman for the Tobacco Institute, said the Washington-based manufacturers’ group endorses the ticketing concept as an extra control on underage smoking. But he added, “We aren’t doing it publicly. We’re voicing support privately because of all the controversy.”

Retailers make no secret of their support. The California Grocers Assn. worked closely with state Sen. David G. Kelley (R-Idyllwild) on California’s bill, according to Kelley’s chief of staff, Nancy Newbill, and the grocers’ Sacramento attorney, Stan Van Vleck.

“We need to stop the demand,” Van Vleck said. “Stop these kids from coming in to buy. If we say, ‘No,’ at [checkout] counter No. 1, and . . . counter No. 2, they keep going until someone says ‘yes.’ ”

Certainly some public health professionals also favor ticketing. Sylvania, Ohio, Police Chief Gerald Sobb said his Toledo suburb enacted a system of youth smoking fines after pleas from a local chapter of the American Heart Assn. and faculty from the Medical College of Ohio.

Many local officials say they discount the concerns about scapegoating because they do not intend to let up on others who play a role in teen smoking.

The Medina Police Department is actually finding it easier to enforce laws against selling tobacco to minors now that the kids are being penalized. A diversion program instituted this year allows cited underage smokers to satisfy a community service requirement by acting as testers in “stings” of the town’s store clerks.

In Pleasant Plains, population 1,000, the children say the two stores in town won’t sell tobacco without an ID. Yet they have no trouble securing all they want.

“My mom buys me cigarettes,” said curly-haired Amanda Fulton, 17. She smiled, baring yellowed teeth, the legacy of a pack-a-day habit begun in the eighth grade.

Parents seem to be a common source here. “I’m not for smoking at all, so I try to ration them out,” said Kevin Kimmons, a nonsmoking mechanic who provides cigarettes to his 14-year-old son, Greg.

“If he didn’t get them from me,” the elder Kimmons explained, “he’d get them from someone else or pick them up off the ground.”

Last school year, before the law was passed, smoking was already against campus rules. Yet it was common for students from both the high school and the adjacent middle school to join bus drivers in an afternoon smoke before boarding for the trip back home.

Other teens clustered by nearby houses and businesses, discarding so many butts on private property that neighbors posted “No Trespassing” and “No Smoking” signs.

This year, during the first week of classes, the principal called two assemblies for the village president to explain the board’s August vote: $25 for a first offense, $50 for a second, a tobacco education class as an alternative to a fine.

The police chief said he’d issue warnings for a while before ticketing begins in earnest. A representative from the American Lung Assn. announced phone numbers for kids interested in quitting.

Predictably, nonsmokers--who see themselves as a distinct minority--support the new law. “It’s real good. They ought to jack the fine up to $100,” said Derrick Butcher, a senior who plays soccer. “I’ve never had a cigarette and I don’t plan to, but I had to quit hanging around with my friends. They wanted me to try it.”

Just as predictably, smokers hate the notion. “What next? They’re going to take our soda because it has sugar?” said Amanda Eller, a 15-year-old freshman.

Newports and Marlboros--two of the three most heavily advertised brands--are the cigarettes of choice, as common here as silver fingernail polish (for girls) and buzz cuts paired with gold earrings (for boys). The name on the box definitely matters. When Greg Kimmons teased Eller by calling her “Miss Salem 100 Lights,” she snapped defensively, ‘Those are my mom’s!’ ”

That is not to say the smokers don’t care about tobacco’s impact on their health.

“It bothers me a lot,” said Fulton, who tried and failed to stop a year ago. “But there’s not much I can do about it.” Erik LaFauce, 16, started smoking in sixth grade and said he’s trying to cut back: “I switched from Newports to Marlboro Lights.”