Teenagers can always get a puff if they have a few dollars in their pockets. Form Five student Peter Chan, who has been smoking since he was 14, always knows where to get cigarettes.
'Some older shop assistants at convenience stores might check my age or ask for my identity card when I buy cigarettes, but the younger ones never bother,' the 17-year-old said. 'Newsstands never let their customers down and my friends and I never have a problem when we buy cigarettes from them. The most important thing is money. When you have money, there is always a way to buy cigarettes.'
He said some small snack stores also sold cigarettes to teenagers without checking their ages. 'Some stores are very smart and let us buy just one or two cigarettes, and it is cheap - only HK$2 for one cigarette. We do not even have to think about where to hide our cigarettes when we cannot finish the whole packet.'
The young smoker said he was not worried about tighter controls on the sale of cigarettes to minors because he could get what he wanted across the border. 'You can buy whatever you want in Shenzhen. My friends and I can just make a short trip there and buy a box containing 10 packets and share them amongst ourselves,' he said.
'We always dress up nicely when we go to buy cigarettes across the border. Custom officers cannot check on every traveller coming back to Hong Kong anyway. We will not be busted easily.'Agnes Lam
