Reducing minors' access to tobacco: project CHALK
Creators: name: University Of California Office Of The President
Publisher: name: University of California Office of the President
publisherIdentifier: https://ror.org/00dmfq477
publisherIdentifierScheme: ROR
Year: 2024

description: Studies have shown that most children who smoke do not obtain their cigarettes from adult members or friends, but instead, buy them themselves in convenience, grocery, and other stores. Minors are successful at buying cigarettes 60-90% of the time, and purchase 1 billion packs per year, despite laws banning sales of cigarettes to minors. Other studies have shown that such easy access to cigarettes is one of the best predictors of a child becoming a regular smoker at a young age. Hence, many programs designed to prevent smoking among youth are directed at the merchants (store clerks and managers) who continue to sell cigarettes to minors despite the law: the logic is that, if we could reduce children's access to cigarettes, we would make progress toward preventing their smoking. Many such programs have been tried with merchants in the state: researchers have educated merchants about the dangers of smoking among children, have reminded them that selling cigarettes to children is illegal, and have threatened (and sometimes have followed through on that threat) to call the police and turn the merchant in. Unfortunately, these merchant-education programs have not been successful: minors still are able to buy cigarettes in stores after the intervention. The question then is: why don't these programs work? 
 
 
 
 
 
 We believe that merchant-education programs fail because the problem is not the merchant but is instead the community. In our prior study, we sent minors to 72 stores to attempt to buy cigarettes and observed not only what the merchant did but what the adult customers in the stores did as well. We found that adult customers who were standing in line and observed cigarettes being sold to our children 1700 times basically said and did nothing to stop the sale, and instead went about buying their own groceries. In 5 out of the 1700 times however, an adult in line said something and the clerk's response was to halt the sale of cigarettes to the child mid-transaction. From this we concluded that merchants continue to sell cigarettes to children because the community permits it. By watching such sales and saying nothing, communities send the message that they approve of the sales; and, by making purchases (spending money) in the store despite seeing the merchant sell cigarettes to children, the community also gives merchants concrete rewards for selling cigarettes to children.
 
 
 
 
 
 Thus, in this project (CHALK: Community Health Alliance for Local Kids), we are conducting a new intervention that focuses not on the merchant, but on the community. Adults who live near the 72 stores and are regular customers will organize their communities to speak up and object whenever they see a merchant sell cigarettes to children, and encourage others to shop at stores that don’t sell cigarettes to children. Simultaneously, we will conduct a standard, merchant-education program in a separate group of stores. Then, we will send children into all stores to buy cigarettes to test the effectiveness of the new versus the traditional intervention. We believe that the new intervention will reduce minors' access to cigarettes to zero and be more effective than the merchant-education program. If so, we will have found a new, inexpensive, and simple strategy that can be used elsewhere to reduce minors' access to tobacco and thereby prevent their smoking.