Pubdate: Thu, 09 Oct 1997 Source: Houston Chronicle Page: 2A Contact: Website: http://www.chron.com/ Study: Regulations to cut teen smoking may be ineffective By BARNABY J. FEDER New York Times Regulations adopted by the federal government last year to make it harder for children to buy cigarettes and chewing tobacco are unlikely to have any effect on teenage tobacco use, according to a study of six Massachusetts communities published today in The New England Journal of Medicine. The federal rules known as the Synar regulations, for the late Rep. Mike Synar, the Oklahoma Democrat who sponsored the 1992 law on which they are based threaten states with the loss of government grants for drug abuse programs unless they reduce the frequency of tobacco sales to minors to fewer than 20 percent of attempts. The rules recommend that performance be measured by local authorities' use of children in sting operations aimed at tobacco retailers. But the Massachusetts researchers found that even in communities with enforcement programs strong enough to have cut the frequency of reported illegal sales below the federal standard, teenagers surveyed said they had little trouble obtaining tobacco. Fiftyeight percent of underage youths who tried to buy tobacco in Somerville, Brookline and Needham towns where successful illegal attempts, as measured by sting operations, were below 20 percent of all such attempts said they were hardly refused. That was not much lower than the 63 percent who responded that way when surveyed in Quincy, Winchester and Arlington, the three towns with no enforcement programs at all against tobacco sales to teen agers. In all, 70 percent of underage youths who tried to buy tobacco said they succeeded most of the time. In each of the six towns, teenagers reported that a growing number of retailers had declined to sell to them. They compensated by shopping in other towns or asking smokers of legal age to buy for them. Over all, access was so easy that the researchers could find no impact on youths' tobacco use from local efforts to enforce the state's minimum smoking age, 18. In fact, while tobacco use among high school students in the three towns with no enforcement programs remained roughly level, it rose in the three towns where enforcement, as measured by the stings, made illegal sales less frequent. The findings, some of which were presented to the American Public Health Association and reported in The New York Times last November, are being cited by tobaccocontrol advocates as evidence of a need for the far more sweeping tobacco marketing restrictions issued by the Food and Drug Administration early this year. Tobacco opponents say the results also lend support to calls for sharply higher tobacco taxes to increase the cost of smoking, an approach that has been the most effective way of discouraging minors in the past. "We need a comprehensive program beyond attacking youth access," said William Novelli, president of the National Center for TobaccoFree Kids, an antismoking organization in Washington. Tobacco industry officials said they had not read the study and so could not comment on it specifically. But Thomas Lauria, a spokesman for the Tobacco Institute, the industry's trade association, said no one could be surprised that teenagers were finding ways to dodge the intent of the Synar regulations. "You can't pass a law ordering teenagers to stop being teenagers," Lauria said. Teenage smoking has become a focus of the tobacco wars because nearly 9 of 10 smokers start before they turn 18, teenage smoking rates have been creeping up, and research shows that the earlier a smoker starts, the more likely to develop health problems later. Some 3,000 American children begin smoking each day, according to the federal government, and as many as a third of them are expected to die of tobaccorelated illnesses. The FDA regulations are being challenged in court by the tobacco, retailing and advertising industries. One provision of those regulations that has already taken effect, reinforcing the Synar rules' intent to reduce youth access, sets a nationwide ban on sales to anyone younger than 18 and requires retailers to demand photo identification of all tobacco buyers who look younger than 30. Research in other communities, most notably Woodridge, Ill., has suggested that teenagers can be discouraged from smoking if the frequency of illegal sales can be cut to lower than 10 percent of attempts. But none of the Massachusetts towns in the latest study enforced their ordinances so vigorously as Woodridge, and they did not follow Woodridge's policy of fining minors caught with tobacco. "I've become convinced that fining minors is an important piece of the solution," said Leonard Jason, a DePaul University researcher who has studied Woodridge and several other Illinois towns. The results of the Massachusetts research, which covered the period from 1994 to 1996, suggest that the Synar standards can be undermined by retailers who have figured out how to avoid being caught in sting operations, said the leader of the research team, Dr. Nancy Rigotti, director of tobacco research and treatment at Massachusetts General Hospital. One problem is that child participants in sting operations have been easy to pick out because they are forbidden by the authorities to show false identifications or lie about their age. Another is that retailers either intentionally or unwittingly employ clerks who follow the law when dealing with strangers but freely sell tobacco to underage customers they know. Teenagers quickly discover which stores in a community will sell to them, and they return there repeatedly, the researchers said. As a result, buying tobacco can be easy even where the vast majority of retailers obey the law. "Compliance tests grossly overestimate actual compliance," said Dr. Joseph DiFranza, a coauthor of the study.