NC House and Senate bills would raise age for tobacco sales to 21, create permitting system for retailers
by Grace Vitaglione, North Carolina Health News
March 20, 2025
Rob Crane watched his father struggle with lung cancer for months before he died in his mid-60s. It was “really horrendous,” Crane said.
As a doctor specializing in family medicine, Crane was inspired by that experience to start raising awareness about the effects of tobacco addiction.
He founded the Preventing Tobacco Addiction Foundation in 1996 and began to push for state legislatures to raise the tobacco sales age. At first, he had scant success. But in 2003, a town in Massachusetts raised the sales age for tobacco and nicotine products to 21 years old.
“I realized the secret sauce was local action,” Crane said.
Now, more than two decades later, he came to the N.C. General Assembly with the same mission — North Carolina is now one of only seven states left that haven’t raised the legal sales age for tobacco to 21.
House Bill 430, introduced by Rep. Donnie Loftis (R-Gastonia), would change that, and also establish a tobacco retail sales permitting system. This would put North Carolina in line with federal law, which sets the age for purchasing tobacco at 21 — something that health advocates have been pushing for. By making it a state law, state Alcohol Law Enforcement officials could also enforce it.
Vaping has become an “epidemic,” and children need to be protected from potential negative health effects of nicotine, Loftis said at a news conference at the legislative building on March 19 about the bill.
In North Carolina, more than 12 percent of high school students used tobacco products in 2022, and more than 9 percent used vapes, according to the Youth Tobacco Survey conducted by the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services.
Strengthening enforcement
Most states are in line with the federal law that says the tobacco legal sales age is 21. That law can be enforced by FDA officials, but they aren’t able to conduct enforcement as thoroughly as state Alcohol Law Enforcement agents. That means the law isn’t followed as strictly as the state law, which sets the legal tobacco sales age at 18.
This legislation would change that — House Bill 430 and its Senate counterpart, Senate Bill 318, would make it a Class 2 misdemeanor to sell tobacco products to someone younger than 21. For young people who try to buy tobacco products, it would be considered an infraction, and part of their consequences might be assignment to a tobacco education program.
The legislation would also require all tobacco retailers to obtain a permit from the North Carolina Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission and pay a renewal fee each year. The fees would fund enforcement of the law.
Although federal law raised the tobacco sales age to 21 in 2019, North Carolina Alcohol Law Enforcement special agents can’t enforce those laws since they’re a state — not federal — agency, Agent Josh Batten said.
In a vape shop, “we can basically do the same thing that you can do as a civilian,” he said.
That also makes it confusing for the retailers, as they’re still supposed to follow federal law, Batten said.
N.C. Alcohol Law Enforcement would need funding for more full-time positions to enforce the new law if passed, he said, as they currently don’t have enough personnel to do so.
Enforcement is also made more difficult because North Carolina — where the legacy economy was built on tobacco — is one of 10 states that doesn’t have a licensing system. Because tobacco retailers aren’t tracked in the state, the true number of them is unknown, Loftis said.
North Carolina is also at risk of losing more than $5 million in federal funds if the state doesn’t up its game on restricting underage tobacco sales. The funds are part of a block grant that can be used for combating the opioid epidemic and supporting substance use disorder treatment.
To receive the funds, states are supposed to annually survey a random sample of tobacco retailers and report the percentage of them that sell to people under 21. If that percentage, called the retailer violation rate, exceeds 20 percent (with a +/-3 percent margin of error), a state could face a cut in its grant funding.
North Carolina’s retailer violation rate is pushing the limit: It was 21.9 percent in the 2023 federal fiscal year, which ended on Sept. 30, 2023.
The legislation would also help level the playing field for retailers who do follow the law, Loftis said.
Vapes in schools
Nearly all adults who have ever smoked daily had their first cigarette before the age of 21, according to the American Lung Association. Most children under 18 obtain tobacco products through older classmates or friends, Crane said.
Tobi Gilbert, a doctor of psychology with the Jacksonville Police Department, said that since some students turn 18 before graduating high school, they’re able to buy tobacco and nicotine products; they then resell them at school.
Vaping is very prevalent in schools, said Jake Petersen, deputy sheriff at Alamance County Sheriff’s Department who is a school resource officer at Eastern Alamance High School. In the past academic year alone, he’s seized 85 vapes.
“Take a stroll down the hallway into the bathroom in a school, and you’re pretty much guaranteed to find a kid with a vape,” he said.
The impact of vaping shows up in their test scores, attendance, behavior in the classroom and ability to socialize, he said. There’s also potential medical issues from the students passing vapes around.
Potential health impacts Charlene Zorn spoke at the news conference about the death of her 15-year-old stepson, Solomon Wynn. He was a football player at New Hanover High School but went from healthy to sick “almost overnight” in the spring of his freshman year, she said.
Vaping damaged his lungs and heart — sometimes he couldn’t walk from his bedroom to the kitchen without getting out of breath, she said.
He collapsed 11 days after his 15th birthday. At the hospital, they said he had suffered from severe hypoxia, or a low level of oxygen in his body tissues. It caused irreversible brain damage and organ failure. He died the next day.
“We need to make sure nobody else suffers like Solomon did,” she said.
Nicotine can also affect the brain. Crane explained that tobacco activates dopamine neuroreceptors throughout the brain, making people feel happy and relaxed. Sunshine, friendship and food also activate the receptors.
But continually activating those receptors by using nicotine means that after a while, the only thing that activates them anymore is nicotine, he said. That leads to higher rates of depression and anxiety in children who vape, especially if the nicotine is taken away.
In developing brains, nicotine can negatively impact decision-making and judgement, Gilbert said.
Concerns over costly regulations
Crane spent decades trying to convince state lawmakers to pass legislation raising the tobacco sales age. He said the tobacco industry’s support of legislators was often a challenge.
Members of the North Carolina Retail Merchants Association, which represents retail business interests in the state, support raising the age to 21, but they oppose the permit requirement, said Andy Ellen, president and general counsel, in a statement.
The new North Carolina Vapor Registry would also prohibit the sale of products that the federal Food and Drug Administration has not approved — brands like Elf Bar and Geek Bar — which will eliminate most of the current products on the market, he said.
“North Carolina should allow the increase in purchase age to 21 and the implementation of the new Vapor Registry to address this issue rather than adding costly and unnecessary regulations to North Carolina businesses,” Ellen wrote in an email.
Neither the House or Senate version of the bill has been heard in any committees yet.
This article first appeared on North Carolina Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
