Raising The Legal Tobacco Age From 18 To 21 Could Save 50,000 Lives

Source from:  MarketWatch 08/17/2020

Upping the minimum age for tobacco sales could spare thousands of lives and avert even more premature deaths, research suggests — though the outlook on teen vaping remains dubious.

President Trump on Friday approved a spending bill that would, among other provisions, increase the minimum legal age for tobacco purchases from 18 to 21. The bill also covers e-cigarette products, which have received great scrutiny amid a youth vaping epidemic and an outbreak of vaping-related lung illnesses linked to an additive in some THC products.

Among people born between 2000 and 2019, boosting the tobacco minimum age of legal access (MLA) to 21 nationwide would yield about 50,000 fewer lung-cancer deaths, 223,000 fewer premature deaths and 4.2 million fewer lost years of life, the report projected. These results likely won’t be observed for at least 30 years, the authors added, “assuming that the MLA increase occurs now.”

Research supports the potential public-health benefits of raising this age threshold, at least for traditional tobacco products. A 2015 Institute of Medicine report sponsored by the Food and Drug Administration estimated that raising tobacco products’ MLA to 21 would result in a 12% drop in tobacco-use prevalence by the time teenagers at that time were adults, though its models didn’t account for e-cigarette use.

Raising the minimum age to 21 “will begin to change access to tobacco products from social sources,” the report suggested, making folks who can legally buy tobacco less likely to be in high-school students’ social networks. Almost nine in 10 cigarette smokers had their first cigarette by age 18, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Nineteen states and Washington, D.C., have increased their minimum tobacco age to 21, says the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, a nonprofit advocacy organization. Some 530 localities have done the same. Needham, Mass., which raised its tobacco legal age to 21 in 2005, saw a bigger drop in youth smoking between 2006 and 2010 than there was in surrounding communities without such a restriction, according to a 2015 study published in the journal Tobacco Control.  Enditem