Public Health Implications of Raising the Minimum Age of Legal Access to Tobacco Products.

Smoking causes chronic illness to the elderly such as lung cancer, and has a negative impact on health in a short period of time. It is unlikely that the adverse health effects of immediate and short-term smoking are directly deadly than long-term health effects. However, they are usually an important public health indicator until later, as they lead to undesirable health conditions throughout the life of the smoker and because many short-term physiological effects contribute to the cause of the disease caused by smoking. It became obvious in the clinic. Adulthood

Smokers can observe the short-term adverse health consequences caused immediately after smoking or shortly after smoking. Therefore, health effects due to smoking begin at the beginning of smoking or near smoking age. Usually this is during puberty. To emphasize the direct effect of smoking on the health hazards, this report examines the importance of smoking on health at every stage of life, including childhood, adolescence and adolescence, middle-aged and late-stage, from a life perspective We are examining the impact. Chronic disease burden may occur. The duration of a particular vulnerability during the lifetime is during pregnancy (mother and fetus) and months after birth (baby); therefore this stage of life is considered separately. In this report, the term "direct health effects" refers to the effect occurring within a few days after smoking, whereas "long-term health consequences" refers mainly to clinical morbidity It refers to rates and mortality. Health effects are used to refer to health outcomes that broadly affect between direct and long-term health effects.

In 2015, the American Institute of Medicine published a report on raising the legal minimum age to 19, 21, or 25 public health effects 2. As a result, it was concluded that the minimum legal age of 21 will be reduced to 15 years old. It is the following smoking rate. 25% of 17-year-olds have reduced lung cancer by 50,000 and 223,000 are being prevented at an early stage. Decreasing smoking for teens improves pregnancy outcomes and reduces the incidence of sudden infant death syndrome by 16%. The report admits that raising the minimum statutory age to 25 years will have a greater impact, but it is more politically difficult to achieve.

Critics point out that many people will start smoking before reaching the current minimum statutory age. Young adults, however, usually obtain tobacco products through friends or brothers of legitimate age (or at first glance). High school students with a legal age over 21 years rarely purchase tobacco products for young students. As a doctor, please do not spare our efforts to prevent young people from smoking. Between 18 and 19 years old is too small to legally obtain toxic or carcinogenic products that can never be safely used. Increasing the minimum statutory age for access to cigarettes is a scientific proof to deprive the tobacco industry from recruiting young generation young people as their customers, legitimate and politically viable, It is a cheap and effective way.

Recently California and Hawaii, and several cities and counties have raised the legal age of the purchase of tobacco products to 21 years old. Bonnie et al. As supported by, we support raising the minimum age to 21 in all states. It may be worthwhile to evaluate the impact of a lower statutory age (over 18 years old), but accurate information on the importance of product hazards may be attributed to other consumers such as car safety assessment It should always be available just like a product. Sweating, printing). US government agencies and well-known health-conscious institutions have long provided information that is misleading about tobacco product risks (Kozlowski and O'Connor, 2003; Kozlowski and Sweanor, 2016).