Everyone knows that tobacco is trouble. It's the hardest thing in the world to stop. This article is not about that. It is not about making you feel bad for using tobacco, or berating you, or being yet another nagging voice to ask you to quit. No judgement here, other than at “big tobacco” for trying very hard to get as many people hooked as they can. I do not need to convince you that tobacco is worth quitting, and if you want help quitting then I, and/or your primary care doctor, know a lot of ways to help you do so. Just ask.
This article, however, is about helping people avoid starting smoking. I see a lot of patients who, amid their 6th attempt at quitting, say something like “I wish I never would have started.” While starting, doing, and continuing anything, including smoking, are all individual choices and I cannot and should not make them for anyone else, we can certainly try, as a community, to make some things easy to avoid. We should make quitting smoking as easy as possible, and we should make avoiding smoking similarly easy, especially for kids.
There are a few ways to do this without compromising freedom of choice. On March 9th and 23rd at 1 pm at the government center (305 Main Street Klamath Falls, OR 97601 Room 214) Klamath county Government will hear testimony concerning one way we could do this in Klamath County. There are a few ways that “big tobacco” targets youth. Tobacco companies use bright colors; fruit, candy, and dessert flavors; as well as advertising campaigns design to attract kids (think about it – who was Joe Camel designed for?). In 2009 the FDA banned flavored cigarettes, which resulted in a 43% decrease in youth smoking and a 27% decrease in young adult smoking. This is just to say that policy changes can work. There are other things that “we the people” can do to help people avoid smoking, from warning labels and photos on packages to making movies with smoking in them rated R. These, however, are interventions that require federal changes, and are not what is on the docket here in Klamath. In Klamath county we are going to be talking about something much more straightforward – how close cigarette retailers can be to schools and daycares. When a store wants to sell cigarettes (or vapes) they apply for a tobacco retail license.
The county sets the rules for those applications, and can set rules for where they can be, how close to each other they can be, and what they can be close to. It seems obvious when said out loud, but the more exposure you have to a place where you can buy tobacco, and the higher the density of retailers, the more likely you are to start smoking. This means, of course, that the less exposure you have, the less likely you are to start. When talking about helping youth avoid smoking, one of the best ways to do so is to decrease the density of tobacco retailers around schools, daycares, and the overall density in town.
This then is the policy we are talking about on March 9th and 23rd. Klamath county is proposing new location rules on new tobacco retail licenses. I highlight the word new here – this will not affect existing locations. This will only affect new applications. The idea is that for new license applications they must be at least ¼ mile away from schools and childcare locations and 1000 feet from each other. Klamath county already has 92 tobacco retailers. Keeping new ones a little bit further away from schools seems like an easy answer. If you feel similarly, feel free to show up at the government center on March 23rd at 1pm (your testimony can be 90 seconds long), or submit written testimony by emailing bocc@klamathcounty.org. If you do, include the subject line “written testimony for March 23rd hearing re: TRL ORD 90.02,” and please cc Jennifer Little (jlittle@klamathcounty.org) and Miranda Hill (mhill@klamathcounty.org ). I urge you, if you want to help our kids avoid getting stuck on nicotine, that you show up or write in offering your support for this change.
Thanks for reading! If interested in hearing more about the Sky Lakes Wellness Center, please call us at 541.274.2770 or visit our website at https://www.skylakes.org/services/wellness-center/
Information provided by
Stewart Decker, MD, MPH, FAAFP, FWMS
Jeanette Rutherford, MA, LPC
Jennifer Newton, RD, LD, CDCES, MPH
