For stopping the illegal sale of cigarettes to minors, efforts by the Coalition for a Smoke Free Valley and the local health departments have been very successful. When the stores are checked, as many as 90 percent of attempted purchases by children are stopped. In Philadelphia, another of only a dozen municipalities with similar tobacco-control laws, successful underage purchases went from 84 percent in 1996, the year its law was passed, to 37 percent last year. Legislation proposed in Harrisburg threatened to halt, and reverse, all that hard work. The stated rationale for House bills 1501 and 1521 was a uniform law for the whole state.
Uniformity is good.
An existing law makes every one of those sales illegal, but that law is rarely enforced. Only when advocacy groups like the local Coalition for a Smoke Free Valley get involved do such laws mean anything. A big difference between local laws and the proposed bill is their emphasis. For instance, the local laws that work impose fines on the retailer, not the nicotine-addicted minor. There's nothing wrong with fining a person who makes an illegal purchase, but the sizes of these fines are upside-down.