President Clinton’s call Wednesday to snuff out teen smoking was met with belly laughs, sneers and profanities in the parking lot across from John Hersey High School in Arlington Heights.
“I’ve been smoking since I was 13,” said Jeff Adams, now 17, “and even if it costs more, I’ll still pay. It’s worth it.”
Teens across the Chicago area, some bedecked in baggy pants, tattoos, giant pearl necklaces and an array of pierced body parts, alternated between giggles and indignation over plans to curb their smoking by hiking the price of a pack of cigarettes by $1.50 over 10 years.
“That’s stupid,” Jennie Rickland, 18, a freshman at Harper College in Palatine. “I don’t think it will stop anyone at all.”
“Even if they were $3.50 a pack, I’d still buy them,” said Marci Fountain, 16, who, hours after the White House announcement, was huddled on the front steps of Schaumburg High School with three other teen smokers.
This determination of area teens to continue smoking in spite of presidential decrees is the strongest evidence that price hikes alone, no matter how steep, are not enough, according to public health officials and police combating teen smoking in the Chicago area.
“If the price keeps going up, it is less likely that teens and children can afford to buy cigarettes,” said Sean McDermott, policy development coordinator for the Cook County Department of Public Health. “But is there still going to be a problem? Absolutely.”
Area teenagers said they will roll their own, snatch free ones from parents or steal them from stores if the day comes that they can’t pony up for a pack of Camels.
“Price alone won’t do it,” said Elk Grove Village Deputy Police Chief Larry Hammar. “These kids are smoking because somehow, some way over these last few years it has become fashionable again, cool, for them to be seen with a cigarette hanging from their mouths. It’s a cultural thing.”
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that 35 percent of Illinois high school students smoke. A study done by the Illinois Board of Education found that twice as many, 70 percent, have at least tried smoking.
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While any federal assistance is welcomed, local officials said, the key to combating teen smoking is to assail it on all fronts simultaneously and continuously in the community, schools and at home.
The first Illinois law prohibiting the sale of tobacco to minors was drafted 110 years ago. A more up-to-date version imposes a $200 to $600 fine for selling tobacco to minors. However, even that has proven ineffective because it is rarely enforced.
Officials in the Chicago area have passed laws that require locks on vending machines, fine teens caught smoking, prohibit minor clerks from selling tobacco and establish programs to help teens kick the habit.
Arlington Heights went so far as to consider banning smoking in all public places.
One of the most widely used and effective efforts to curb teen smoking is to license merchants who sell tobacco, according to health officials and police. Licensed merchants are monitored and occasionally subjected to sting operations using undercover underage kids. Stores that sell to minors are fined. Repeat offenders can lose their licenses.
License laws are used in 54 Cook County suburbs. And county officials are drafting legislation that would expand them to unincorporated areas of the county so that kids can’t just go across the street or over to the next town to get the cigarettes denied them by local merchants.
In addition to blocking access to cigarettes, officials said they will continue to push for smoking bans that reduce teens’ exposure to older smokers and school programs that teach the dangers of smoking.
“Attacking the supply side is not the answer. You have to attack the demand side,” said Woodridge Police Chief Geoff Korous, whose community pioneered tobacco licensing in the Chicago area.
But teenagers remained equally determined not to let the mandates of village boards, the statehouse, Congress or the White House tread on their sense of cool. They said they’ve heard all the warnings, but shrug them off.
“I know the consequences of smoking,” said Evelina Kushner, 17, of Naperville. “It would not be money that makes me quit. I will quit when I think it is time to stop.”