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Last week the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family announced a new policy intended to restrict teenage smoking. The policy will require all teenagers to present identification cards proving they are 19 years of age in order to buy cigarettes or alcohol from next year. Licensed vendors of tobacco and alcohol will have their permits revoked if they continue to sell these substances to underage customers.

At present the Youth Protection Act prohibits cigarettes and alcohol from being sold to costumers under the age of 19, yet no identification is required for the purchase of these products. Independent vendors in particular are rarely subject to checks and as a result there are no firm statistics on who is buying cigarettes or if they are of the legal age to do so. The new regulations were formulated by a total of nine ministries, including the Ministry of Health and Welfare and the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, while being approved by the Korean Association of Smoking and Health, who welcomed the long awaited regulation updates.

In recent years the introduction of multinational tobacco firms and their products has coincided with the number of underage smokers rising significantly within the nation. A survey conducted on 80,000 students in 2009 by the Korean Center for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) suggested that up to 80 percent of the students surveyed had bought or attempted to buy cigarettes in the past. The same survey revealed that nearly 16 percent of male high school students and 5.3 percent of female high school students claimed to smoke cigarettes daily.

Meanwhile figures previously presented by Grand National Party lawmaker Lim Hye-kyu suggested that the number of underage daily smokers has sky rocketed over the past decade ? from 3.9 percent in 2005 to 6.5 percent in 2008. It was also reported that the number of habitual smokers had steadily increased compared to the number of occasional smokers, while those habitual smokers were also smoking more cigarettes each day. It appears that this worrying trend isn’t just confined to older students, as 10.3 percent of boys and 6.5 percent of girls said they had smoked before entering middle school. Furthermore only 50.8 percent of students said they had received antismoking education more than once per year.

Coupled with the recent announcement that the average Seoul citizen is exposed to 50 minutes of cigarette smoke per day it seems that maybe the nation’s smoking culture is having a noticeable effect on its students, who are being socialized into the habit at an increasingly young age. Understandably this issue has raised concerns amongst many, culminating in the new policies and discussions of whether cigarette advertisements should be banned from convenience stores. However, will these strategies have any discernable effect on the number of young people smoking or is it simply a case of too little, too late? Unless the nation’s smoking culture changes the latter may be true.

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