CHAPEL HILL -- It's
easy for underage teenagers to buy cigarettes over the Internet
using credit cards or money orders because almost none of the
vendors verifies buyers' ages, a UNC-Chapel Hill researcher reported
Tuesday buy
cigarettes.
Standing
beside a pile of more than 1,500 packs of Marlboro cigarettes bought
by children as young as 11, Kurt M. Ribisl , an assistant professor
at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Public Health, announced the
results of a study that exposed an electronic pipeline of smokes to
minors cigarettes
online.
The results are in
today's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association
online
cigarettes.
Four
Orange County teens in Ribisl's study made 83 attempts to buy
cigarettes and succeeded in 76 instances -- almost 92 percent of the
time.
Most
of the vendors warned on their Web pages that they would not sell to
minors, but only four blocked dute
free cigarettes sales when the teens failed
to provide a copy of a driver's license showing that they were 18 or
older. Eighteen is the legal age to buy cigarettes in most states,
including North Carolina cigarettes.
"We
need to have an [age] verification system for the Internet," Ribisl
said, noting that there is no federal law specifically banning online
cigarettes sales to minors. North Carolina's law
does not specifically mention the Internet in its proscriptions
against sales to minors.
Ribisl
said other rules are lacking on the delivery end. In all but one
instance in the study, the packages of cigarettes
were simply dropped off at the teens' homes by mail or a delivery
service, with no label identifying the contents as tobacco products
cigarettes
online.
Ribisl
called for such labeling, along with a requirement that an adult
sign for delivery. "Our biggest surprise was that the cigarettes
were just left at the door," he said discount
cigarettes.
Health
officials are particularly cigarettes
online concerned about keeping teenagers from
smoking cigarettes because of its long-term consequences. A study
released separately this week by researchers at Duke University
Medical Center found that adolescent rats given unlimited access to
nicotine self-administered the drug at twice the rate as adult rats
online
cigarettes.
|