Study: ‘Tobacco-21’ Working as Intended

Sales of cigarette brands disproportionally consumed by young people have fallen in jurisdictions that raised the minimum purchase age to 21, according to new research published in Tobacco Control.

“Tobacco 21” (T21) policies proliferated at state and local levels across the United States before a federal policy was adopted in late 2019. The authors of the study examined demographic patterns of cigarette brand purchasing to evaluate the effectiveness of the laws.

To capture the effect of T21 implementation on cigarette sales, they used universal product code-level data from Nielsen Scantrack data covering January 2015 to October 2019.

“Sales of disproportionately young brands declined after T21 implementation,” the researchers wrote in an abstract of their study. “T21 policy implementation dates fit disproportionately young brand sales trends better than 99 percent of adjusted randomized placebo models. T21 implementation fit disproportionately old brand sales trends better than just 1 percent of adjusted randomized placebo models.”