So you're all worried about little Johnny or Sarah smoking? Good. Children shouldn't smoke, its a nasty habit even for adults. But marching down to your Congressman or Senator's office to demand they make a law that attempts to keep tobacco products out of young people's hands isn't going to work, if anything, that's going to make the idea of smokinig more appealing to young people. In the history of our government, no prohibition of any kind has ever worked the way it was supposed to, and to be truthful, nobody on either side expected or wanted it to.
When you prohibit a substance or thing, immediately there is a huge black market for that substance. During prohibition in the 1920's, you had gangsters, rum runners, moonshiners, speakeasies, and all sorts of corruption fueling both sides of the controversy. More recently, the "war on drugs" has had a serious economic and tragic impact on our society. There are people who see selling drugs as an easy way out of their dead end lives, while the people who have enough to live on think drugs are "evil." Another example of absurd prohibitions is the attempt by the "Brady" Bill to restrict gun ownership only to citizens with a clean criminal record. The people who use guns in violent crimes normally get them through a third party, either purchased by someone else, stolen, or on the black market, thus the Brady Bill, while looking really good, hurts the law-abiding citizens more than the criminals it was supposidly designed to target.
Another example of rediculous attempts at prohibition is trying to restrict the teaching of sex education in this country when it has been proven that comprehensive sex education has caused young people to abstain or be more careful when choosing to have sex. We owe it to our children to inform them and educate them with all the information, not just some of it, and let them choose for themselves.
Yes it is painful to say that our children are going to have to make decisions when they may not be emotionally or physicaly mature enough to handle them, but we as adults cannot be with them 24 hours a day 7 days a week to look after them, and the law isn't going to stop them from doing what they have decided to do anyway. The answer is to love and guide them as best we can when we have them with us. We have to arm them with the tools and understanding that there are many bad things out there that they need to avoid. Also, it is statistically proven that parents who smoke will have a higher chance of having children who smoke, so parents need to set an example by kicking the habit themselves. By prohibiting minors from purchasing tobacco products, we've placed more barriers and more reasons for our children to turn away from our guidance and our love rather than finding ways to show them that smoking isn't healthy for them. But then again, the government has been attempting to legislate a change in attitude in this nation for most of this century with little or no success, so what makes them think this is going to change anything? We supposidly live in a free society, but the government is becoming dangerously powerful in deciding who can do what where with whom, all red flags that something needs to be done about taking back some of what is ours as responsible citizens.