The legal age for buying tobacco, including cigarettes, electronic cigarettes, cigars and cigarillos will rise to 21, from 18, under a bill adopted by the City Council and which Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has said he would sign. The new minimum age will take effect six months after signing.

The proposal provoked some protest among people who pointed out that New Yorkers under 21 can drive, vote and fight in wars, and should be considered mature enough to decide whether to buy cigarettes. But the Bloomberg administration s argument that raising the age to buy cigarettes would discourage people from becoming addicted in the first place won the day.

This is literally legislation that will save lives, Christine C. Quinn, the Council speaker, said shortly before the bill passed 35 to 10.

In pushing the bill, city officials said that the earlier people began smoking, the more likely they were to become addicted. And they pointed out that while the youth smoking rate in the city has declined by more than half since the beginning of the mayor s administration, to 8.5 percent in 2007 from 17.6 percent in 2001, it has recently stalled.

Besides raising the age to buy cigarettes, the Council also approved various other antismoking measures, such as increased penalties for retailers who evade tobacco taxes, a prohibition on discounts for tobacco products, and a minimum price of $10.50 a pack for cigarettes and little cigars.

The new law is a capstone to more than a decade of efforts by Mr. Bloomberg, like banning smoking in most public places, that have given the city some of the toughest antismoking policies in the world.

In one concession to the cigarette industry, the administration dropped a proposal that would force retailers to keep cigarettes out of sight. City officials said they were doing it because they had not resolved how to deal with the new phenomenon of electronic cigarettes, but others worried that if the tobacco industry lodged a First Amendment challenge to the so called display ban, it could have derailed the entire package.

The smoking age is 18 in most of the country, but some states have made it 19. Some counties have also adopted 19, including Nassau and Suffolk on Long Island. Needham, Mass., a suburb of Boston, raised the smoking age to 21 in 2005.

James Calvin, president of the New York Association of Convenience Stores, warned on Wednesday that thousands of retail jobs could be lost because the law would reduce traffic not just for tobacco, but also on incidental purchases like coffee or lottery tickets. He predicted that the law would do little to curb smoking, as it does not outlaw the possession of cigarettes by under age smokers, only their purchase.

Just before the vote, Nicole Spencer, 16, was in Union Square in Manhattan with a cigarette wedged between her fingers.

I don t think that s going to work, Nicole said when she heard about the plan to raise the age.

She said she began smoking when she was about 13, and had no trouble getting cigarettes. I buy them off people or I bum them off people, she said.

She said that probably half of her friends at her high school smoked.

Nicole said she thought 18 was a reasonable legal age, echoing Councilman Jumaane D. Williams, who said he voted no because it was not right for the city to ask young people to make life or death decisions as police officers and firefighters yet to have no ability to buy a pack of cigarettes.

Some people using foodbanks buy cigarettes instead of food – telegraph

Cigarettes online Blog Archive 10news – e-cigarettes under fire by critics, team 10 tests the vapor – 10news.com – team 10 investigates

There are many disturbing facts and accounts in the Feeding Britain report on foodbanks and the financial problems of Britain s poorest. Admirably balanced and non partisan, the thoughtful, considered response it s had from most politicians is well deserved.

Still, there s one aspect of the report that seems a little under explored. Here s a quote from the document

“The other force at work is the addictions that many individuals and families have, but which particularly sharply affects the budgeting of low income families. We refer here to the size of income in some families going on drugs, tobacco and gambling.”

And another

” tackling these serious addictions is as crucial for the overall health of our society as it is in restoring a sense of dignity and control individuals have over their own lives and their tackling of these serious addictions is as crucial for the overall health of our society as it is in restoring a sense of dignity and control individuals have over their own lives and their own budgets. We make recommendations here on how food can be used as a way of kick starting a recovery process for individuals who find themselves in such desperate situations.”

Related Articles

  • Poor going hungry because they can’t cook, says Tory peer

    08 Dec 2014

  • Families go hungry as supermarkets send millions of tonnes of food for landfill

    08 Dec 2014

  • Is Britain back on the Road to Wigan Pier?

    04 Dec 2014

In other words, let s make sure poor people are eating properly, then we can help them smoke and drink and gamble less.

On that basis, the report then largely ignores the question of spending on booze and fags and gambling. While it discusses the share of household income being spent on food and non alcoholic drinks, utilities and the rest, it has almost nothing else to say about how much is spent on drink and tobacco.

I can understand why. There are too many people who want to focus on the issue in an attempt to argue or just imply that poor people are poor because they chose to be, that they go to food banks because they spend money on the “wrong” things instead of food. My best guess is that the authors didn t want to get into that debate, so they ignored the question.

To be clear, I don t want to make any such argument, or imply any such thing. I suspect some people will glance at the headline of this piece and conclude “Oh look, a heartless Telegraph toff sneering at poor people for smoking.” But that is not what I m about here. I offer no judgement on poor people who smoke if I was in the dire straits described in the Feeding Britain report, I suspect I d want the comfort of a cigarette, or any other earthly pleasure I could get my hands on. And for all that non smokers like me can be prone to look down on weak willed smokers, we should acknowledge that this is a monstrously addictive drug, and remember there but for the grace of God smoke I.

Still, facts are facts whether or not we find them convenient or comfortable. And the fact is that some poor people do spend some of their money on things like tobacco and alcohol. And obviously, a pound spent on cigarettes cannot be spent on food. For reference, the average packet of 20 cigarettes now costs f8.46. So surely a fully rounded look at the issues of food and poverty should include some analysis of spending on such things, shouldn’t it?

Let s start with the basics.

Because the price of goods like alcohol and tobacco is, broadly speaking, fixed, consumption of those goods is regressive a poor person who buys 20 fags a day will spend a much greater share of their income than a rich one. The IFS has estimated that people in the lowest income group spend roughly twice as much of their income on tobacco and alcohol than those in the richest.

There s also some evidence that poorer people are more likely to do things like smoke, and when they do, to smoke more than richer people

I m using 2013 ONS household expenditure data here, and using occupational group as a proxy for income not perfect, but the best I can find today.

The same data show that unemployed people smoke much more than those with jobs

Then there s drink. Poor people drink less often, as it happens

Smoking in particular is worth focussing on here, not least because the Feeding Britain report offers this thought

“A family earning f21,000 a year, for example, where both parents smoke 20 cigarettes a day will spend a quarter of their income on tobacco. Even if people buy illicit tobacco they will still spend 15% of their total income on tobacco. Budgeting support is terribly important, but budgetary support alone is often not enough to equip families to kick their addictive habits when addiction is being fed and defended by some very powerful lobbies.”

Read that again. Some poor families may be spending a quarter of their income on tobacco. A quarter.

That figure is actually even higher than an estimate produced last year by the Institute for Economic Affairs last year, which said that the average smoker from the poorest fifth of households spends between 18 and 22 per cent of their disposable income on cigarettes.

(The IEA also noted that tax on these cigarettes consumes 15 to 17 per cent of those families incomes. A cynic would note that central government therefore has a financial disincentive to reduce tobacco consumption.)

Surely any serious attempt to address food poverty should have more to say about this issue than vague accusations about “powerful lobbies” exploiting the poor? Surely any move to ensure that poor people can and do spend more money on good food has to include an attempt to reduce the amount they spend on tobacco? Surely it s not good enough to say that we have to sort out the food problem before we can sort out the tobacco problem? Because the basic economic fact is that tobacco is part of the food problem.

Again, just to repeat the caveat, I don t raise this to criticise or denigrate those on low incomes who spend money on tobacco. I raise it because any attempt to discuss the problems of those people that doesn t address their full spending patterns is incomplete and likely to fail.

If you care about poor people and want them to eat better, get them to spend less on smoking. Does that mean banning cigarettes? Taxing them even more? Or actually cutting the tax to make them cheaper? Or doing much, much more to help and encourage them to quit? There may well be an argument to be made for all of those options, and others besides. Sadly though, that’s not part of the foodbank debate today.