Experts and stakeholders yesterday observed that proper enforcement of the amended tobacco control law has become indispensable to protect the young generation especially adolescents from the negative impacts of tobacco use particularly smoking.They told BSS that one of the strongholds of the amended law for tobacco control is that it bans the selling of cigarettes to those below 18 years. Terming tobacco as the root cause, the experts observed that all the life-decaying drug addictions including smoking by the school-going adolescents lead to harmful consequences.“Cigarette consumption must be restricted among the adolescents to a greater extent for the sake of building an addiction-free society as smoking is considered as the primary gateway drug that eventually leads to drug-addiction,” said Prof Dr Mushfique Ahmed of Rajshahi University.Salima Sarwar, Executive Director of Association for Community Development (ACD), said “Many parents go through painful experience when they had to hand over their addicted wards to police or rehabilitation centre for their rectification.”She said the phenomenon has become frequent calling for a comprehensive policy involving social, fiscal, administrative, legislative and enforcement-related issues to reduce tobacco onsumption among the teenagers.Dr Mujibul Haque Azad Khan, a Professor of Department of Psychology of Rajshahi University also told BSS that the offenses of juveniles are not only limited to telling lies, running away from schools, stealing, teasing girls, they are also involved in other higher degree of unlawful activities like drug addiction which greatly affect overall law and order situation of the society.Md Shamsuddin, Commissioner of Rajshahi Metropolitan Police, said young ones get easily carried away to do unlawful activities like drug abuse because of their surroundings.He said equal participation of members of law-enforcing agencies and community is needed for ensuring a hundred percent drug-abuse free society.The experts also stressed that the teenagers should know about the criminal laws to develop law abiding mindset.The researchers and academics gave their observation that the teenagers commit different types of crimes even the major ones mostly because they don’t know anything about legal consequences.They said the adolescents need special care and positive behaviors from their near and dear ones as they are important section of the society.BSS, Rajshahi
