IT’S AGAINST THE law to sell or give cigarettes to minors, yet 36 percent of the high school students in South Carolina smoke. That’s more than 50 percent higher than the national average.

We know that nearly all of those kids will become lifelong addicts. We know that 90,000 S.C. kids currently younger than 18 will die prematurely because they became lifelong addicts. We know that even those who don’t die prematurely will suffer from lung cancer and emphysema and depression and anxiety disorders — and add to the $307 million a year the rest of us are already paying in taxes just to provide medical care to the ones who wind up on Medicaid.

And yet what have we done to try to stop this?

Practically nothing — despite the fact that there are simple, obvious steps our state could take to reduce the number of kids who smoke, steps that have been demonstrated in other states to work.

We could invest in anti-smoking programs that make smoking seem uncool, from the media campaigns that have worked in other states to our state’s own innovative Rage Against the Haze teen-to-teen program, which seems to be exciting officials everywhere except in South Carolina. But that costs money, and so legislators, unaccustomed to investing now for huge payoffs later, aren’t interested.

We could raise our embarrassingly low cigarette tax, and price some kids out of the market — again, a strategy that has been proved to significantly reduce teen smoking. But that might make cigarette manufacturers and smokers mad, and it might violate those absurd “no new taxes” pledges that far too many legislators have mindlessly signed, and so legislators aren’t interested.

We could even reduce teen smoking by ... making it illegal for kids to smoke. But that — well, we can’t even think of an irrational objection, but still our Legislature hasn’t done it.

Amazing as it sounds, it is not illegal for kids to purchase or possess cigarettes in South Carolina. Most kids probably don’t know this. But they do know that no one they know has ever been arrested for smoking; change that, and you might make a few kids think twice about taking up smoking.

The House passed a bill that makes it illegal for minors to purchase or possess cigarettes, just as we do with alcohol. It even added those changes to a second, broader bill designed to reform the Medicaid program that provides free medical care to all the former teen smokers who burned out their lungs and hearts and everything else. And then the measure was added to another bill. But the stand-alone bill died in the Senate Judiciary Committee, where it had been since March 4 — 2003. The other bills died on the Senate calendar.

Then one of those galling things that happens all too frequently at the State House happened. The Senate — which had been sitting on the measure for more than a year — voted unanimously to attach it to a related bill bill headed back to the House.

And the House refused to go along.

Thus, each body can claim it tried to pass this simple bill to keep a few of our kids from killing themselves. And legislators in both bodies will continue to play games like this with our children’s lives for as long as we sit quietly back and let them.