Posted 4/20/2007 06:43:00 PM by Douglas

It's official. There are no longer any significant issues in Texas that the State Legislature needs to address. That must be the case. After the idiotic marriage bill I figured those in Austin would find something to do besides get drunk. Nope, they're at it again, this time attacking the things that keep most Texans up at night worrying: Adults buying cigarettes. Yep, you read that right:

You're old enough to vote and serve your country at 18, but you'd have to wait a year to buy cigarettes under a bill approved Thursday by the Texas Senate.

"The further you can put this (legal age) off, there's a much better chance that people will not start to smoke," said Sen. Carlos Uresti, D-San Antonio.

His Senate Bill 448, approved 26-4, moves to an uncertain future in the House, where it doesn't yet have a sponsor. Rep. Garnet Coleman, a Houston Democrat on the House Public Health Committee, said he doesn't have a position on the bill but would like to see it aired.

The maturity vs. adult argument is so arbitrary that we as a society have decided to draw a line in the sand, and that line is 18 years old. At 18 you can vote, enlist in the military and even consent to have sex with that hot teacher in your high school math class. So why try to raise the 'smoking age' (geez, it even sounds funny saying it) to 19? You can legally consent to sex, yet you can't smoke afterwards? Why push to raise the smoking age when there's a current push to lower the drinking age to include all adults?

Look, you're either an adult member of society or you aren't. For too long, alcohol has been given an unreasonable exemption at 21 instead of the universally accepted 18. It's time to push drinking back down to 18, too, not bring smoking up to 19. There have been 28 brave men and one woman that gave their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan that never saw their 19th birthday.

Someone tell them they're too young to understand the consequences of tobacco.