SAMPLE LETTER TO LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT

Dear [Officer/Official],

Our children and our community need your help.

Although it has been illegal for more than 100 years, retailers throughout our region continue to sell tobacco to children at alarming rates. Across San Diego County more than one-third of all merchants recently surveyed sold tobacco illegally. We’ve spent years trying to educate retailers about the long-term health and financial consequences of selling tobacco to children, yet clearly many retailers put their own financial interests above the law.

To protect our children from these would-be profiteers, we’re working to enact tough local licensing laws. The model ordinance [under consideration] can deter illegal sales. This law is self-funding, providing strict enforcement measures and meaningful penalties for those who break tobacco retail laws. Its passage would send retailers the message that our community is serious about protecting our kids from the deadly addiction of tobacco.

We know tobacco and kids don’t mix:

• Nicotine addiction in children is very different than in adults -- often taking hold within weeks or emerging just days after youthful “experimentation.”
• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found the younger a person is when he or she starts smoking, the more difficult it is to quit.
• More than 74 percent of California’s adult smokers started smoking before they were 18 years old.

The financial costs are just as devastating as the emotional and physical toll tobacco takes. In 1999, smoking cost San Diego County $1.2 billion in direct health care costs and lost productivity due to illness and premature death. That’s $2,975 per smoker and $443 per resident.

Enacting and enforcing tough new local laws that revoke licenses from retailers who illegally sell tobacco will help save a generation from lifelong addiction and potential death and disease. It will also help stem the financial toll that tobacco takes on our community.

Contra Costa County is proof that active enforcement of state and local laws regarding tobacco sales to minors reduces the percentage of retailers who illegally sell to children. In 2002 37 percent of Contra Costa’s retailers surveyed illegally sold tobacco to children. One year after enforcing their tobacco retail licensing ordinance that suspends licenses of repeat offenders, the county’s illegal sales rate plummeted to 2 percent.

While the recently enacted California Cigarette and Tobacco Products Licensing Act of 2003 (AB 71) requires any business that sells tobacco to have and display a license from the Board of Equalization, it was designed to combat smuggling and counterfeiting issues, not to reduce illegal sales to children.

The good news is AB 71 allows communities like ours to enact our own, more stringent licensing laws. We urge you to support passage of the model local licensing law to protect our children and our community from Big Tobacco’s ravages.

Sincerely,