Smoking in a Car with Kids is Not Illegal Everywhere – Yet

A viral post making the rounds on Facebook claims that smoking in a car with kids became illegal as of January 30th of this year (2018). After digging a little deeper, I found this isn't the case everywhere. Not yet anyway.

The post links to an article from a website called, Love This Pic.com, which according to their "About" page "is a place for people to come and share inspiring pictures, quotes, DIYs, and many other types of photos." This basically means the content found on the site is submitted by people who use it. This likely means there's not much fact-checking going on. However, in this case, while it doesn't seem to be entirely accurate, it's not entirely wrong.

What gave me pause on the validity of the article was that after reading through it, I noticed there were no specifics. What I mean is no where in the article does it say where this law is taking place. There's no mention of a specific state, or even if this is a federal law covering everybody everywhere.

With that said, it doesn't appear to be entirely made up. According to Find Law.com, the decision to ban smoking in vehicles with children is left up to each individual state, and there are some who have laws on the books that make it illegal. In Arkansas, it's illegal to smoke in a vehicle when anyone 14-years-old or younger is a passenger. In California it's 18-years-old, while in Louisiana and Puerto Rico the cut-off age is 13. It's 16 in Maine, 15 in Utah, and 8 in Vermont.

As of right now, there are no laws, that I could find anyway, prohibiting smoking in a vehicle with a minor present in Indiana, Kentucky, or Illinois. However, if this is something you feel strongly about, shoot an e-mail to your government representative at the local, state, and national level and let them know you'd like to see things changed.