Should Florida raise the smoking age to 21?
You must now be 21 to buy tobacco in this Florida college town, joining a national trend - Miami Herald
Excerpt: Students entering the University of Florida from high school who smoke will have to wait until they become juniors or seniors before they buy tobacco and light up.
That’s because Alachua County, home to the Gainesville campus, has become the first county in Florida to raise the minimum age for tobacco sales from 18 to 21, News4Jax reported.
It won’t completely change life at UF. “Smoking has been banned on campus since 2010, so [the ordinance is] not a concern for the university campus specifically,” said UF spokeswoman Margot Winick.
But students of legal age can still buy tobacco products and smoke them elsewhere.
Bottom Line: While personally I hope no one takes to smoking cigarettes therefore, I’m not troubled with this trend on a personal level, I do find myself scratching my head an awful lot of what the heck society does seem to be smoking. I’ll come back to that in a moment. Six states (all traditional blue states), including the largest California, have raised the age to buy tobacco products to 21. As a result, many counties around the country, all left leaning including now Alachua, have done the same. Again, personally I’m good with this if you feel strongly enough, but here’s the thing. Simultaneously these states, have taken action to enable marijuana smoking when it’s federally illegal. I also have little doubt many of these counties would as well if they could.
And that’s the thing. Intellectually where’s the rational in further restricting smoking tobacco use while simultaneously taking extraordinary action to enable smoking marijuana? That’s all I really want to know. What I would like to do is propose a companion bill federally Here’s my offer...
- Decriminalize marijuana in all forms federally
- Raise the legal age to purchase tobacco products to 21
- Raise the age to be able to vote to 21 excluding any service members
Do we have a deal? After all, if you’re not old enough to buy smokes are you really old enough to vote on the people who make those decisions?