Enormous efforts have been made in recent years to discourage children from taking up the habit of cigarette smoking. Educat-ional programmes and other methods to raise awareness of the dangers of smoking among children have proliferated, and rightly so.

The ban on cigarette advertising, the legal insistence on prominent health messages on packets and the forcing up of prices to around £6 for a packet of 20 have all played their part in helping to reduce levels of smoking in society generally but especially among children.

Those efforts are seriously undermined when profit-chasing shopkeepers cynically sink to the depths of selling individual cigarettes to minors. To do so is illegal and can only be pursued for the most sordid of motives – profiteering (cigarettes priced at 40p each means £8 a packet and a substantial extra profit for the offending retailer) and encouraging addiction with the hope of creating future customers.

Smoking kills. Smoking as a child risks embedding a lethal addiction at an age that is almost guaranteed to lead to fatal consequences. So selling children individual cigarettes is tantamount to drug dealing as well as child abuse.

Rather than a fine or the threat of sanctions, perhaps the time has come for those who flout the law and abuse the efforts of so many concerned agencies and individuals, to be dealt with accordingly? The threat of a mandatory prison sentence could prove to be a better deterrent.