USA-NC: Loophole in US child labor law allows children’s exposure to tobacco nicotine – HRW

The smoking habits of the presidential candidates keep coming up: Barack Obama’s efforts to quite, Mitt Romney’s abstention. Romney signed a ban on smoking in bars, restaurants, and indoor workplaces in Massachusetts in 2004; President Obama signed a law in 2009 that broadly restricts marketing cigarettes to children. Far less attention, however, is being paid to the nicotine exposure of children who work alongside adults cultivating and harvesting tobacco. In eastern North Carolina, HRW researchers interviewed children as young as 14 who worked in tobacco, and recent news reports describe children as young as nine and 10…