Alderman Suggests Raising City's Legal Smoking Age To 21
By Chuck Sudo in News on Apr 23, 2013 4:40PM
Not content to let New York City City Council Speaker Christine Quinn dominate the media spotlight with her proposal to raise the Big Apple’s legal age to buy cigarettes to 21, Ald. George Cardenas (12th) said Monday he was in favor of exploring a similar ordinance in Chicago.
The Sun-Times reports Cardenas, chair of the City Council Health Committee, said the idea of raising the age to buy cigarettes from 18 to 21 is “worth exploring because more kids are smoking now.” According to 2009 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of cigarette smoking youth climbed again after a trend of declining numbers in the 1990s and early 2000s. The percentage of high school students in 2009 who were smokers stood at 14 percent, with 12.8 percent of that number being black, 12.7 percent Hispanic and 14.9 percent white, non-Hispanic high school students.
Cardenas may be in favor of exploring the option of raising the smoking age, but Mayor Rahm Emanuel was non-committal and pointed out taxes on cigarette sales help pay for health care expansion. But how much tax is enough? The recent hike of Cook County’s cigarette tax sponsored by County Board President Toni Preckwinkle brought the cost of a pack of cigarettes in Chicago to $6.66. A study of cigarette butts by the University of Illinois at Chicago indicated 75 percent of smokers ventured outside Cook County to buy smokes. Preckwinkle called the cigarette tax hike a “proven policy tool” that lowered smoking rates while providing revenue for the county health care system. The same argument, along with offestting impending health care costs, was used by Gov. Pat Quinn when he proposed a hike in the state cigarette tax.
If Cardenas moves forward and actually proposes a tax hike, he’ll be in a possibly untenable position. On one hand, critics of the proposal would use it as another example of government as a nanny state, while Emanuel and other politicians would express concern about the dropoff in revenues if such a proposal passed. This being Emanuel’s City Council, where he’s benefited from a better support in his own ordinances in his first two years in office than Richard M. Daley did in his first 24 months, this could simply be a case of wishful thinking on Cardenas’s part.