Medindia LOGIN REGISTER
Medindia

Scotland Plans To Raise The Legal Age For Buying Cigarettes

by Srilakshmi on Nov 24 2006 12:38 PM

The Health Ministry of Scotland has planned to raise its legal age for buying cigarettes from 16 to 18. Andy Kerr, Scotland's Health Ministry said that the new legislation would go into effect from March.

The legislation was planned following the recommendations made by an expert group on smoking prevention on Wednesday. The expert group included several other suggestions like imposing fines to the stores that sell tobacco to minors and introducing negative licensing law, which would ban stores repeatedly selling tobaccos to minors.

Mr. Kerr added: "I'm sure we have to be much more assertive around controlling those who sell cigarettes to those who are clearly underage, as we are doing with test purchasing schemes at the moment. The legislation here is clear, the responsibility of vendors is clear, so there is no excuse."

Scotland leads in raising the legal age to buy cigarettes and also made it illegal to smoke in enclosed public spaces in March. Scotland is now being followed by England and Wales, who, are supposed to institute the same law next year and it is expected that the rest of Europe will certainly be included in this list in the forthcoming years.

Source-Medindia
SRI


Advertisement