Use this search box to find articles that have run in our newspapers over the last several years.
| By Katelyn Gendron-List, Staff Writer WEST SPRINGFIELD After receiving a $70,000 grant from the Department of Public Health and the Tobacco Control Board, a highly motivated human service agency, the G ndara Center, has taken to the streets on a new mission: to curb tobacco availability and tobacco addiction in local youth. The grant requires Michael Pease, program coordinator of Youth Tobacco Prevention at the G ndara Center, along with local teens, to run compliance checks on the sale of tobacco to minors at 265 different retailers in 12 towns, according to Alison Jones, director of prevention at the G ndara Center. "After completing the first round of compliance checks we found that one in five merchants were selling to minors," Pease said. The procedure for the compliance checks is simple, according to Pease. He works with local minors who go into to the merchant's shops and ask for a pack of cigarettes. If the minor is sold the cigarettes then the pack is treated as evidence, and it is bagged and tagged, in case the Board of Health wishes to obtain it as evidence. However if the minor is asked for the proper identification, they will then tell the merchant that they have forgotten it and leave the premises. "My job is not to sneak up and catch the retailers selling to minors," Pease said. "My job is in support of a larger public health plan to try and drive down youth access to tobacco." After the compliance checks were completed at the end of March, Pease stated that the next phase of his job was to go to each of the 265 merchants in the 12 towns (Agawam, Chicopee, Hampden, Westfield, West Springfield, Blandford, Chester, Granville, Holland, Southwick, Tolland and Wales) and to distribute educational packets about how to comply with Massachusetts state tobacco sales laws. "My training is on the ground with each retailer one at a time to ensure that they have a 100 percent understanding of the law," Pease said. The Youth Tobacco Prevention Program at the G ndara Center comes in the wake of the 2002 state budget cuts that severely cut funding to the Department of Public Health; this in turn cut their funding for tobacco prevention, according to Jones. "We had a model prevention program in Massachusetts," Jones said. "Youth smoking went down significantly before 2002, but when the money was cut youth smoking went on the rise again." According to Jeanne Galloway, director of West Springfield's Health Department, and Kathy Phelps, a registered sanitarian for the West Springfield Health Department, there is little time and resources available to them to fight youth tobacco consumption in their city. However Phelps is required to respond to complaints received from people that have witnessed the purchasing to cigarettes by minors at various locations. Phelps stated that she also tries to take time out to educate retailers on the proper signage and carding procedures when she goes out on food inspections. "I did support the G ndara Center when they applied for the grant from the Health Department because the funding for our entire Tobacco Prevention Program was cut," Galloway said. "Now we just don't have the time and the resources to spend on tobacco but I've very glad to see that they've gone out there to let the sellers know that we're out there." Looking towards the future, the G ndara Center has an even larger goal, and not just to make sure that the laws governing the sale of tobacco to minors are affective, but they want to create future generations of non-tobacco users, according to Pease. Figures produced by the Department of Public Health state that tobacco use costs the state $3.46 billion in health care costs. "The number one health concern is tobacco," Pease said. "And generations of smokers are getting unhealthier as they age and we lose scope of this because it's legal to consume. It may be legal but it's not healthy." Currently the G ndara Center is looking for additional grants and funding so that they may further their services, according to Jones. |