Illegal sales of tobacco to underage Ohioans is at the lowest level ever recorded, and authorities attribute the improving compliance rate to tougher enforcement and more education among retailers.

In fiscal year 2010, about 9.9 percent of Ohio retailers were caught selling tobacco to underage customers, according to a report released Thursday by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The administration said it was lowest violation rate in the state since the organization began tracking such sales 15 years ago, and the rate was down from from 13.5 percent in fiscal year 2009 and 15.9 percent in 2008.

Nationwide, about 8.5 percent of retailers in 2010 were caught selling tobacco to minors. Two-thirds of U.S. states have a retail violation rate of less than 10 percent.

The violation rates of tobacco sales to minors in most states only falls when authorities increase enforcement activities, officials said. State authorities said they are committed to tobacco compliance.

“We feel that education for the retailers combined with compliance checks are contributing to the low rate of tobacco sales to minors,” said Julie Hinds, spokeswoman with the Ohio Investigative Unit, which handles compliance checks.

Retailers who believe their stores could face compliance inspections are much more likely to follow the rules, said Susan Marsiglia Gray, the program coordinator for the Synar Regulation, named for the late Oklahoma Congressman Mike Synar, an advocate against tobacco smoking.

“When the enforcement is occurring regularly, and there is meaningful penalties for violations, we tend to see the retailer violation rate go down,” she said.

The Synar program is a federal mandate that makes sure states enact and enforce laws prohibiting the sale or distribution or tobacco products to minors. Compliance checks involve underage customers attempting to purchase tobacco from retailers.

Marsiglia Gray said the decreasing violation rate is encouraging because almost 90 percent of adult smokers began using tobacco before the age of 18. She said if children do not use tobacco before they become adults, it is very unlikely that they will pick up the dangerous habit.

“If we can keep kids from getting access at retail sources, they are much less likely to take up tobacco and become smokers as adults,” she said.

Tobacco use is the leading cause of preventative death and disease in the United States, and smoking and exposure to secondhand smoke is responsible for 443,000 deaths each year, according to the services administration.

Prevention is extremely important because smoking is very addictive and quitting is exceptionally hard, said Shelly Kiser, director of advocacy with the American Lung Association in Ohio.

But Kiser said unfortunately the vast majority of young people who smoke do not buy the tobacco themselves. She said most young smokers get their cigarettes from friends or family members. Some ask strangers who smoke if they can have a cigarette, or they will ask adults to purchase the tobacco for them. Some youths steal tobacco.

“But every little thing we do to stop kids from getting tobacco and accessing tobacco helps, so it is still good that the number of sales to kids is going down,” she said.

Youth in Ohio have higher rates of heavy tobacco use than young people in most other states.

A June 19 article in the Dayton Daily News reported that 9.5 percent of student-age Ohio teenagers reported smoking cigarettes on 30 or more days before being surveyed, according to the 2011 Youth Risk Behavior Survey for the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. The nation average was 6.4 percent.