In Missouri, health workers canvass thousands of stores to provide employees with educational materials on tobacco sales laws. Police monitor stores and hand out tickets to clerks caught selling cigarettes to underage customers. There's a lot of activity. The impetus to quell tobacco sales to teens came from a 1992 federal law called the Synar Amendment, named for the late Oklahoma congressman and tobacco control advocate Mike Synar. Under the amendment, states are required to conduct random, unannounced inspections of tobacco merchants to assess their compliance with state laws against sales to minors.
States enlist youth volunteers to conduct the undercover compliance checks.
States that fail to steadily reduce violation rates to no more than 20 percent could lose part of their federal Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment block grants. Past compliance poor Missouri's compliance was so poor in 1998 that the state almost lost some of its federal money. But the U.S. Senate changed the rules to allow states such as Missouri to keep their block grants if they agreed to spend additional money of their own for enforcement and prevention. Short-lived regulations on tobacco sales to minors imposed by the Food and Drug Administration in the late 1990s also have improved compliance by stores selling tobacco, state officials say. Until the the U.S. Supreme Court overruled the FDA's authority last year, the federal agency paid states to conduct additional undercover cigarette purchases by teen-agers.