4th District Cities Slow to Respond to Cigarette Ban
While western Riverside County cities are almost unanimously supporting the county's ban on sales of tobacco products to minors... Fourth District cities are apparently not as eager to get on board.
With the Fifth District City of Moreno Valley this week formally requesting-and receiving-approval of an agreement to defer licensing requirements to the County's Health Department, all but one of the Western County cities have joined the County's fight against underage smoking. And Health Department officials expect the City of Perris to be in the fold in the near future.
It's a completely different picture in the Fourth District, as only the City of Coachella is on board (although Health Department officials are optimistic that the City of Blythe will participate in the near future).
The Health Department has used teenaged decoys in a sting operation to find out how many merchants in any given city are selling to minors. What the numbers show is that in the Fourth District, teenagers have a much better than 50 percent success rate. This in turn means that if a youth is successful most of the time, the occasional turn-down is likely to mean that he or she will merely try another store with a high likelihood of success.
"We will not win the war on tobacco by finding better treatments for lung cancer and emphysema, but by keeping a generation of kids from starting to smoke," Supervisor Wilson said.
There is no cost to the city or the county for this program. License fees cover the entire cost of regulation and enforcement. Over 90 cities and counties in California now require tobacco merchants to be licensed.