Teens that Smoke must be stopped
The other day I witnessed something that was just so sad and horrible to see. A kid that was maybe 11 went up to a grown man and said “excuse me sir, can you buy me blunt?” And the man responded “sure, what you want” and proceeded to buy it for him. That night I went home disgusted and amazed to see something like that happen right before my eyes. And in the process of thinking about it I said to myself “we have to do something about this.”
As I was thinking about this that night I decided to do some research on teens that smoke and found out that in some areas gas stations and stores sell the product directly to minors and clearly that is unacceptable. What makes it worse is that more and more communities begin to impose stronger punishments on merchants who sell to the teens.
I think that police officers need to tighten up their coverage on this and that their should be one police officer patrolling gas stations and preventing more stuff like this from happening. They should even setup programs that include local licensing of vendors, repeated undercover inspections for both random people and vendors, and more education in schools.
True, tightening down on stores that sell tobacco to minors isn¹t going to completely stop the problem of teen tobacco use. Teens continue to get them from other sources. But it definitely does hamper their efforts. With more education in schools, and perhaps stronger punishments for teens caught with tobacco, more and more teens will see the problems with the tobacco usage, and will stop the habit.