Key Points: Reducing youth access to tobacco products is an important component of a comprehensive program to prevent and reduce tobacco use among young people. Current efforts include combinations of compliance investigations, retail education, media & social marketing, youth engagement, public policy, and counter-industry strategies. With increased tobacco industry “socially-responsible” initiatives that stress youth access, it becomes essential to network programs across the country to strategically counter the tobacco industry's coordinated efforts.

Learning Objectives: Participants in the session will learn the contemporary issues that affect youth access to tobacco, hear examples of successful components of established youth access programs, assess the status of comprehensive efforts in their own state, and apply the new knowledge to direct their future efforts.

Benefits: The Centers for Disease Control maintains that reducing youth access to tobacco is an important piece of comprehensive tobacco control efforts and that the combination of frequent compliance checks and enforcement of youth access laws has been shown effective. This session offers an opportunity for youth access programs from various states to network in order to counter coordinated industry efforts. Considering there are more than one thousand different organizations across the country involved in controlling youth access to tobacco and only a few tobacco companies, networking among youth access programs can be a powerful force towards countering the tobacco industry.