Bigger fines planned in sale of tobacco to minors

The Nutter administration and City Council, hoping to reduce the relatively high smoking rates among Philadelphia children and adults, are planning bigger fines for merchants who sell tobacco products to minors.

A national survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that smoking rates among high-school youth in Philadelphia rank among the highest in the nation's big cities, city Health Commissioner Donald Schwarz testified yesterday in Council.

About half of Philadelphia high-school students have smoked a cigarette at least once, and studies show that up to half of them will become daily smokers as adults, Schwarz said.

With nearly 30 percent of the city's adults now smoking, he said, "Philadelphia has the distinction of having the highest rate of adult smoking among the 10 largest cities in the U.S."

Schwarz said the habit kills nearly 2,500 city residents each year and costs hundreds of millions of dollars in reduced productivity and health-care expenses.

Council gave preliminary approval to an administration-backed bill to raise the fine for selling tobacco to minors from $100 to $250 per incident.

"A striking example of the current law's deficiency is a merchant who sold cigarettes illegally to youth seven times in a span of two years," Schwarz testified. " . . . For this merchant, and countless others . . . it doesn't serve as a deterrent to continued illegal behavior."

Most jurisdictions in the rest of the state treat tobacco sales to minors under 18 as a criminal misdemeanor, subject to penalties ranging into thousands of dollars for repeat offenses. Pittsburgh has virtually eliminated sales to minors by enforcing the law, Schwarz said.

But treating the offense as a crime requires involvement by the District Attorney's Office and the courts. To avoid adding to the strains on the court system, the city has opted for less-stringent noncriminal penalties - and hundreds of violations continue to occur, said Giridhar Mallya, director of policy and planning for the city's Department of Public Health.

Mallya said the city issued 449 citations last year for tobacco sales to minors, collecting just over $40,000 in fines.

The year before, with a bigger budget to put young people on the street to attempt to buy cigarettes, the city issued about 800 violations and collected nearly $70,000 in fines, Mallya said.

A CDC survey conducted last year showed significant differences in underage smoking between white and minority teenagers.

More than 15 percent of white high-school students in the city reported that they had smoked on at least 20 of the past 30 days, the CDC said. Only 3.1 percent of Latino youths and 1.2 percent of black youths reported smoking that much.

But Mallya said the data appeared to reflect the expense of smoking and the lack of disposable income among minority youths.

"It's a national trend," he said. "Many Caucasians start smoking in their teens. For African-Americans, young adulthood is when they start having disposable income, and you see their smoking rates rise rapidly when they become older."