Dear City Councilmember:
Our children and our communities 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 surveyed in 2004 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 continue to break the law. Licensing tobacco retailers can deter illegal sales. By providing strict enforcement measures and meaningful penalties for those who break tobacco retail laws, we send retailers the message that our community is serious about protecting our kids from the deadly addiction of tobacco. 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. 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. I urge you to implement a local licensing law that includes the following provisions: - A permit for all tobacco retailers, not just those that break the law - An annual permit fee sufficient to cover the cost of administering and enforcing the permit program - Compliance with all state, local and national tobacco control laws as a condition of holding the license - Inspections of all stores or a representative sample of stores each year for compliance with the law - A schedule of penalties that includes suspension and revocation of the license for violators who repeatedly sell tobacco to minors. If we can prevent teens from smoking by reducing their access to tobacco products, then we have a chance at decreasing the number of future adult smokers and, hopefully, the terrible financial, emotional and physical toll that tobacco use causes. Sincerely,