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Tulare County - On January 1, California's new “Smoke-free Cars with Minors” law took effect which prohibits smoking in cars when youth under 18 years old are present, giving California the most comprehensive smoke-free car law in the nation. The law was passed to protect children in response to growing scientific evidence that smoking in cars exposes passengers to high levels of toxic secondhand smoke.

According to the 2006 Surgeon General's Report, there is no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke. A team of environmental scientists from Stanford University also published a recent study showing that peak levels of secondhand smoke from smoking in a car can be up to 10 times greater than the level which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers hazardous.

Evidence shows that children are especially vulnerable to the health effects caused by secondhand smoke. According to the EPA, secondhand smoke causes 31,000 asthma attacks in children each year. Secondhand smoke is also a known cause of bronchitis, pneumonia and ear infections in children.

For the past two decades, those of us living in Tulare County, and all of California have benefited from public health laws that protect our communities from tobacco and secondhand smoke. This new law protecting youth from secondhand smoke in cars is an important and logical extension of that protection.

Effective January 1, 2008, the “Smoke-free Cars with Minors” law prohibits smoking in a motor vehicle, regardless of whether the vehicle is stationary or moving, in which a minor (under 18 years old) is present. A violation is punishable by a fine of up to $100 and categorized as a secondary offense, meaning an officer may not pull over a vehicle for the sole purpose of checking if the driver is smoking with a minor present.

Tobacco kills more Americans than AIDS, alcohol, car accidents, murders, suicide, drugs and fires combined. By working together, the Tulare County Tobacco Awareness and Education Project (TCAEP) combines its efforts with the community to reduce the negative impacts of tobacco in Tulare County. The TCAEP coalition is committed to promoting a tobacco-free environment through prevention, education, encouragement of public policy, and broad-based community support for tobacco prevention. The Tulare County Tobacco Awareness and Education Project is a grant program of the Tulare County Health & Human Services Agency that is funded by a grant from the California Department of Health Services.

The above story is the property of The Valley Voice Newspaper and may not be reprinted without explicit permission in writing from the publisher.