Teen tobacco sales
stings net mixed results
State officials found nearly 95 percent of stores inspected this year complied with laws against selling tobacco to minors, but county police stings found much more room for improvement.
Of 211 stores checked by state Health Department inspectors in spring, 11, or 5.2 percent, sold tobacco to minors, the department announced yesterday. That was the lowest noncompliance rate in the nine years the state has been keeping track of illegal tobacco sales to teenagers and among the lowest in the country.
But during county police sting operations across the state, 15.9 percent of 1,136 stores sold cigarettes to minors even though the teenagers presented identifications showing that they were under 18.
The teenagers who participated in the Health Department surveys tried to purchase cigarettes without presenting IDs.
"We have definitely done an incredible job teaching people to ask for identification. Now we really need these people to check the IDs," said Elaine Wilson, state Department of Health Alcohol & Drug Abuse Division chief.
Fay Callejo, 16, purchased cigarettes from four stores in the past year. Callejo will be a senior at Farrington High School in the fall and is a student volunteer in the Health Department's inspections and police sting operations.
At a supermarket in Hilo, Callejo was able to purchase cigarettes even though the store clerks are required to enter the tobacco purchaser's birth date into the register to verify their age. She said the clerk did not ask for her identification.
"He just put zero-zero-zero and it went through," Callejo said, "He was young, he was tying to be cool."
At the other stores, two on Kauai and one on Oahu, the clerks did ask Callejo for her identification but either misread her birth date or miscalculated her age. She said one clerk even used a calculator.
The Health Department is distributing magnetic cards that can be placed on cash registers to make it easier for store clerks to determine whether a teenager is old enough to buy cigarettes. State law prohibits the sale or distribution of tobacco to minors under 18. The mandatory penalty for a first offense is a $500 fine. The fine for subsequent offenses can range between $500 and $2,000.
"There's usually never been a second offense. 'Cause once a clerk is fined $500, they do not ever sell tobacco to youth again," Wilson said.
The clerks caught selling cigarettes to underage teens in police sting operations were fined $500. The stores whose clerks were caught making illegal tobacco sales during the Health Department inspections received letters of noncompliance.
The federal government requires states to conduct the inspections annually. If the noncompliance rate is 20 percent or higher, Hawaii stands to lose $2.8 million in federal money, Wilson said. The state's compliance rate was 6.2 percent last year and 6.0 percent the previous year.
Last year, 13.9 of the stores targeted in police sting operations sold tobacco to minors. In the previous year, 17.6 percent sold to minors.
State Health Department
www.state.hi.us/health/