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Homepage To anyone who wants to stop minors from smoking: forget about using the taxes on tobacco to make the cigarette packs too expensive. It's ridiculous. All it does it irritate the hard-working adults. Simple solution: sell cigarettes only by the carton. It's already illegal to sell cigarettes outside of a pack. Make it illegal to buy single packs. Sell by the carton. Most kids won't have the twenty bucks all at once to buy smokes. If you raise the tax on single packs, the kids are just going to pay the extra price for one pack. It won't seem like that much to a kid who is buying one pack at a time.
Plenty has been done to cut down on teen cigarette smoking. It's already illegal to sell cigarettes to anyone under 18. Plus, in Pennsylvania, anyone who doesn't appear to be over 26 must show ID as proof of age. There's a big Surgeon-General's Warning on every ad and a little warning on every pack. Just keep the current rules and add the Carton Rule. Then leave it at that. Don't force hard working adults to waste EVEN MORE money on cigarettes.
Quit all this taxing and suing. The taxes hurt the adult smoker. The lawsuits are unwarranted.. Sure, the cigarette companies aren't holy and innocent, but no one FORCES anyone else to smoke. People KNOW smoking is unhealthy. Smokers begin to smoke totally by choice. They continue to smoke by choice to some degree. Nicotine is not heroine. The cigarette companies are just a convenient target for politicians and lawyers.
And if cigarettes are just so freakin' terrible, then make cigarettes ILLEGAL. Just come right out and do it.
A partial solution is to GIVE AWAY Nicorette or NicoDerm or whatever to all smokers with children. Next to peers, PARENTS are the main influence that encourages kids to smoke -- not Joe Camel. If kids see their parents puffing all day, they're not going to listen when those same parents say, "Don't smoke! It's bad for you."
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