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.