Our View: On new tobacco rule: What's the point of it?

The Carlton County Board of Commissioners passed a revised tobacco ordinance last month, and we have a question: Why bother?

The new ordinance prohibits the sale of tobacco and vaping products to people under the age of 21, which a federal law already does.

But the revised version completely removed the provision that would have prevented stores from selling flavored products. That means, as long as you’re 21 years old, you can buy bubblegum flavored vapes, spearmint chew and even grape flavored cigars.

The revisions came after a number of local business owners that sell tobacco products complained that the previous flavor ban would eliminate menthol cigarettes and other minty tobacco products, and it would affect their business negatively.

So we figured a compromise was coming, we

just didn’t think they’d throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The resolution may have changed, but the statistics are scarier than ever, and we’d like to remind readers of the dangers of things that come in more flavors than lip gloss in the 1980s.

According to Minnesotans for a Smoke-Free Generation, research finds that more than 80 percent of youth who ever tried tobacco reported starting with a flavored tobacco product. Two thirds of current high-school tobacco users in Minnesota reported using a flavored product. Flavored tobacco products are driving the youth nicotine epidemic, which has erased nearly two decades of progress to reduce youth tobacco use. The 2019 Minnesota Student Survey found more than a quarter of Minnesota 11th-graders and 11 percent of eighth-graders used an e-cigarette in the past month. From 2016-2019, the eighth-grade vaping rate nearly doubled.

To be fair, we found that the revised county ordinance will accomplish a few things that President Trump and Congress didn’t already accomplish with their own T-21 bill.

It gives local law enforcement the ability to enforce the law, something the federal law doesn’t do. It also prohibits tobacco sales near schools (although existing stores are grandfathered in).

We’ll close with more information from an FDA study on youth flavored tobacco use from 2016, which noted that 97 percent of current youth e-cigarette users had used a flavored e-cigarette in the past month and — wait for it — 70 percent said they use e-cigarettes “because they come in flavors I like.”

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