Some old habits should die young.
On Dec. 20, Congress included a provision in a spending bill to make 21 the new legal age for buying tobacco products along with e-cigarettes and vaping products.
To date, state agencies in West Virginia have not communicated this new age down to retailers or discussed how it will be enforced.
Though more than a score of states — including all our neighbors except Kentucky — already had 21 on the books as the legal age for buying tobacco and vaping products, West Virginia did not.
In January, our newspaper endorsed Senate Bill 348 in the Legislature, which would have hiked the age to 21.
That bill advanced out of the state Senate on a 20-14 vote on Feb. 27, but died in the House Health and Human Resources Committee.
Our thought then, in response to arguments against this bill, was legislating morality is no more the charge of legislators than it is this newspaper.
However, it’s the mission of lawmakers and media outlets to speak up for public safety and certain products, like tobacco, create public health hazards.
Hazards such as second-hand smoke and the threat of addiction to such products at a young age being much tougher to best are a couple that come to mind.
Though West Virginia’s smoking rates remain high we are making progress toward reducing those rates.
In December 2017, the state’s Bureau of Public Health reported the rate of adult smoking fell from 28.6 percent to 24.8 percent from 2011-’16.
What was even more encouraging about that decline was that much of it was attributed to evidence of more adolescents who never smoked aging into the adult population.
Efforts such as Monongalia County’s comprehensive smoking ban in 2008 and increased state taxes on cigarettes in 2016 do prevent smoking.
But the best approach to stopping tobacco use among underage adolescents and young adults is raising the minimum age to buy tobacco products.
Many still forget the fact that smoking remains the leading cause of preventable death in our nation.
But it’s time we paid attention to the fact that we’re only helping the very young to that end by selling them tobacco products over the counter.
One of the key components of SB 348 and the new federal provision is that it also targets vaping products that in little more than a decade has grown into a $6.6 billion business.
We urge state authorities to get behind this federal mandate and declare that 21 is now the law of the land to buy tobacco products.
This new age could cause generations of West Virginians to realize more healthy and longer lives.
