Posted on 02/23/2014 12:52:40 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Lawmakers in Utah and Colorado are promoting legislation to raise the legal age for tobacco use to 21, a higher standard than imposed by any other state, saying they want to discourage young people from picking up a lifelong smoking habit.
Supporters say keeping tobacco out of the hands of young adults will save thousands of lives, even as critics complain that Americans who are old enough to vote and serve in the military should not be deemed too young to decide on their own if they should smoke.
In a dramatic display of the risks of smoking, lawmakers in Utah, a heavily Mormon and conservative state, hosted a wheelchair-bound and oxygen-tank-dependent 86-year-old longtime smoker at a committee hearing this week.
"I think a picture is worth a thousand words. I'm that picture," Betty Lawson, who suffers from smoking-related pulmonary disease, told a Utah Senate health committee on Thursday.
"Nineteen-years-old, I picked up my first cigarette. It's a creeping, insidious thing that has you before you know it and you can't turn loose," she said.
A Utah bill to raise the smoking age to 21 advanced from a committee hearing in the state Capitol on Thursday and now awaits consideration by the full Senate. If passed and signed into law, the legislation would take effect on Jan. 1, 2016, to allow smokers now ages 19 or 20 to turn 21.
A House committee on health, insurance and environment in outdoor-oriented Colorado also advanced its proposed legislation on Thursday with Democratic support. Republicans voted against it.
The Colorado legislation would grandfather-in current tobacco users between ages 18 and 21.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsmax.com ...
Thank you. I was trying to think of a tactful way to say what you did...very tactfully.
Legalizing pot and banning tobacco.
Who says the drug war ended?
I remember that as well, but I remember them being 49cents (but that was NYC which was always higher than most other places.)
No smoke, no vote! If you’ve got to be 21 to smoke (i.e., not of sufficient age to make a reasonable decision), then it stands to reason you shouldn’t be allowed to vote.
Of course they would lose a lot of tax revenue.
Depends on the State...some things still do. I think the youngest is 14.
I remember when cigs were 19¢ a pack out of a machine. You put in your two dimes, pulled the handle and out came a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes or any other brand available. Inside the wrapper was a bright new penny.
They cost 17¢ at the store. “Marvel” cigarettes, the generic of it’s day were just 14¢ a pack and if you wanted to go even cheaper, Buy Bull Durham and rolling paper.
Yes indeed, I’m old.
BLOAT
I remember when cigs were 19¢ a pack out of a machine. You put in your two dimes, pulled the handle and out came a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes or any other brand available. Inside the wrapper was a bright new penny.
Recess time after lunch was more crimes against the state involving a majority of the class. The teacher would go to his office and most of the class would go over a small hill and down to the creek bank where the daily accumulation of contraband from parents cigarette packs were lit up and inhaled.
I was raised by non smoking parents so I didn't start smoking till high school where it was openly permitted. I was born in 1957 so age 18 was the age of majority in my state for all things. I'd smoke maybe a cigarette or two a day and after leaving high school I stopped. Then I enlisted and I smoked in Boot Camp at smoke breaks just because smoke and cokes were allowed. On the ship I used Skoal because smoking spaces were limited.
After I got out of the Navy and married my first wife smoked and so did I as did my second wife for about a year. I quit with maybe a total of five years being a regular smoker. I didn't have any problems quiting. Sis on the other hand would smoke five packs if they were handed to her.
Colorado?
Home of the perpetually stoned dopers?
“Sorry son, You’re too young to buy a pack of Luckies. How about a nice bag of dope?”
My mom used to send me down to the corner store to get her a pack of smokes from the cigarette machine.
They cost 18¢ a pack back then so she would give me 20¢ in nickles and dimes.
When you bought the cigarettes they came out of the machine with two pennies taped to the pack.
Thanks for the ping!
Instead of no tobacco until 21, I’d rather the age to vote went back to 21. Obama got in with the help of the 18 to 21 voters who wanted a cool Black dude.
What would be nice is if the voting age went back to 21 except for people in the military.
I would raise it to 25, except for people in the military, because that age is apparently when the human brain is finally fully developed.
sorry, just saw this. Powers That Be.
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