Don't get me wrong. I am not trying to suggest that we abandon our laws against teen-age consumption of either alcohol or tobacco. I started smoking in the summer of my fifteenth year, and I am still smoking as I approach my fiftieth birthday. I wish I had never started, and I know that I would not have started as young as I did if the conditions that exist now existed back then. I can say this with confidence because I did not have my first drink until I was stationed in New York where it was legal for me to drink even though I was under twenty-one. While I admit that I was in the minority as a teen, I know that there are teens today who are like I was. The current laws against teen-age consumption of both tobacco and alcohol are sufficient to prevent these teens from starting, or at least to delay their starting until they are legally old enough.

However, such teens are an insignificant minority, so insignificant that the existence of laws against the consumption of alcohol or use of tobacco by their age groups in addition to the use of draconian penalties against those cashiers and/or retail outlets found in non-compliance have done nothing to reduce teen use of either of these products. The fact is that teen use of both tobacco and alcohol has gone up in spite of laws, in spite of compliance checks, and in spite of stiff fines and the loss of license for retail outlets found in non-compliance. The result is that we have wasted tax-payer's money and police resources as well as destroyed lives in a plan of attack that has accomplished nothing in terms of the goal, that goal being to reduce teen-age consumption of tobacco and alcohol.

In addition, we have started stock-room debates on the ethics of police departments and on the issue of entrapment. If compliance checks are indeed entrapment, as many believe, than can law enforcement departments be ethical if they use them as their sole means of enforcing the law?

I have studied four Supreme-Court cases in which the issue of entrapment is a pivotal point in the guilt or innocence of the defendant. (You will see the results of that study on another page of this site.) In this study, I have found lines which, when taken out of context, do appear to support the use of compliance checks as a law enforcement tool. But, when the entire documents are read, another story can be told.

Compliance Checks, used for enforcement purposes, are a flagrant violation of the spirit of the law as cited in all four of these Supreme Court cases. In addition: the fact that laws against the sale of either tobacco or alcohol to minors allows no room for the very real fact of human error; the fact that most states punish both the cashier and the retail establishments (the victims of a purposeful criminal intent on the part of minors to violate the law) far more severely than they do the actual ones with the criminal intent; the fact that most law-enforcement agencies to little or nothing to detect and prosecute violations of the laws against possession and use of either alcohol or tobacco by minors; and the fact that violations of laws that prohibit the possession and use of tobacco by minors are grossly ignored my many law-enforcement agencies, place a serious question on the ethics of the use of Compliance Checks to enforce the law. Because of this, I am convinced that if even the most conservative court were to consider the evidence you will find here, it would be forced to rule that Compliance Checks, used as they are now, are indeed entrapment.