Tobacco Age Limit Raised Under Smokescreen of $1.4T Spending Bill
Photo by Vapor360 via Wikimedia Commons
The FDA has announced the raised age limit to purchase tobacco products, signed into law by the President along with the latest spending package, is now in effect.
A new law in the United States that prohibits the sale of tobacco products to anyone under the age of 21 is now in effect, according to the US Food and Drug Administration.
Last week, President Donald Trump signed the new minimum age into law as part of a sweeping spending bill. On
Friday, the FDA noted on its website that “it is now illegal for a retailer to sell any tobacco product — including cigarettes, cigars and e-cigarettes — to anyone under 21. FDA will provide additional details on this issue as they become available.”The increased age restriction for tobacco purchases is one of several provisions outside of the spending measures themselves attached to the broader $1.4 trillion spending agreement.
Trump tweeted last week that the spending agreement “raises smoking age to 21! BIG!” — marking the change as one of its highlights.
The restriction on tobacco sales has long been pushed by a bipartisan mix of senators: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican; Republican Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah and Todd Young of Indiana; as well as Democrats including Sens. Richard Durbin of Illinois, Tim Kaine of Virginia and Brian Schatz of Hawaii.
Those lawmakers have been looking for a way to get the prohibition across the finish line and now they’ve found one, by attaching it to a must-pass series of bills to avoid a government shutdown.
This strikes me as one of those things that came out of nowhere. Who was clamoring for this?Report
It’s been building for years. 19 states and 500 smaller jurisdictions, accounting for over half of the US population, had already raised the age for buying tobacco to 21. The cigarette companies have been their own worst enemies on this — discovery in legal proceedings came up with internal reports that said, basically, if the kids weren’t hooked before they turned 21 they were unlikely to get hooked at all.Report
A tipping point, I guess.
Ah, well. It’s a filthy habit.Report
I hope that if there are any more Eric Garners out there selling to 20 year-olds, that they have this new law enforced against them too.Report
Remember when Congress had the decency to pretend to respect the Constitutional limits on their authority and went through the motions of using highway funding to bribe states to raise their drinking ages?
I don’t, because I’m not old enough. But I bet Pepperidge Farm remembers.Report
I wiah i could like this a thousand tume.Report
I will take the point of view that this is generally good. Tobacco is a cancerous habit. We should lower the drinking age though.Report
I only note that this is an example of the turning wheel of culture I mentioned. The collapse of the political power of the tobacco lobby and the popular support for smoking is really amazing in hindsight.
It didn’t just happen magically. It happened through a sustained and determined political lobbying effort that grew from a tiny minority to an overwhelming majority within a generation.
We talk about this from time to time here, about how disconcerting this can be. Who knows which way the winds will shift, and what opinion or practice will find itself on the defensive next?
But on the other hand, its not like cigarette smoking was just picked out of the thin air arbitrarily. It is obviously and irrefutably harmful, and really has no benefit to offset its damage.Report
Will drugs follow a similar route… illegal to sell but legal to possess?Report
I imagine that this will somehow result in high-end tobacconists being more-or-less left alone (given what age I imagine the cigar/pipe crowd to be) but the people who cater to the folks who just want a pack of smokes will end up having the law enforced disproportionately on them.Report