13-05-2013, 02:22 PM
Teen Smoking
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Introduction
Deaths caused by smoking have reached epidemic proportions. In the
United States alone, 430,000 people die annually from smoking-related
illnesses such as cancers and lung disease. Stephen Jay, chair of the Department
of Public Health at Indiana University School of Medicine,
states that tobacco’s “human toll far exceeds the Black Death of the 14th
century, the global influenza pandemic of 1918–19, and the modern
tragedy of HIV-AIDS.”
Health care advocates, concerned about tobacco-related deaths and illnesses,
have worked tirelessly to discourage cigarette smoking in the
United States through education campaigns that warn the public about
the potential health dangers of tobacco use. A particular target for these
antismoking messages is teen smokers. According to 2001 data collected
by the American Cancer Society, teen smoking rates have gradually decreased
since their rapid rise throughout the 1980s and most of the 1990s.
Despite this encouraging decrease in the number of teen smokers, however,
approximately three thousand teens still start smoking each day.
One-third of these teens will die prematurely of a smoking-related disease.
One hotly debated issue in the effort to prevent teen smoking is the
role that tobacco industry advertisements play in influencing teens’ decisions
to begin smoking. Health care professionals view the tobacco industry—
often referred to as “Big Tobacco”—as a rich, adversarial force to
be reckoned with. In 2002, for example, the United States spent approximately
$800 million on various tobacco-control initiatives, including antismoking
campaigns aimed at teen smokers. Big Tobacco, however, spent
nearly $8 billion on tobacco marketing. Such aggressive tobacco marketing
is worrisome to those working to prevent teen smoking, since many
tobacco advertisements often reach a youth-oriented audience.
The case of the cool, smoking camel
As evidence of tobacco advertisements’ negative impact on American
youths, antismoking groups often point to R.J. Reynolds’s Joe Camel advertising
campaign, which debuted in 1988. Joe Camel was a cool, sunglasssporting,
leather-jacket-wearing cartoon character featured on billboards
and in magazine ads. According to one 1991 study published in the Journal
of the American Medical Association, Joe Camel was as easily recognized by
six-year-olds as Mickey Mouse. It was not long before this highly recognizable
figure began to attract young smokers. By 1995, 13.3 percent of teen
smokers smoked Camel cigarettes, a fact that led antismoking groups to accuse
R.J. Reynolds of marketing tobacco specifically to minors.
Lawsuits against Big Tobacco
R.J. Reynolds’s discontinuation of the Joe Camel campaign in 1997 did
not decrease criticism against the company. As a result of unrelated litigation
in the same year, R.J. Reynolds and other tobacco giants were required
by the courts to release documents that proved that the industry
had made a practice of illegally targeting teen smokers through their ad
campaigns. In addition, the tobacco industry was found guilty of suppressing
evidence of known health hazards linked to smoking.
In light of these findings, 1997 became an expensive year for the tobacco
industry. It settled numerous class-action liability suits that found
the industry culpable of knowingly contributing to smoking-related
deaths and illnesses. The state of Florida settled its suit with the industry
for $11 billion; Minnesota for $6 billion; and Mississippi for $3.4 billion.
In yet another class-action suit, sixty thousand flight attendants settled
their case with the tobacco industry for $300 million.
Teen Smoking: An Overview
Susan Dominus has worked as an assistant editor at Glamour magazine,
a feature editor and contributor for The American Lawyer magazine,
and senior editor at New York Magazine.
Each day more than two thousand youths try cigarettes for the first
time. Some teens think smoking looks sexy or cool; others hope cigarettes
will help them lose weight or make them seem independent.
Having parents who smoke is also likely to influence a teen’s decision
in favor of smoking. With their busy schedules, many teens today
suffer from similar stresses and anxieties as adults. Many turn
to cigarettes for the same reason adults do; nicotine has the same
calming effect on teen smokers as it does on adults. Cigarette advertising
also encourages teens to smoke. Cigarette ads are designed
to make smoking appealing, and many are geared for the teen audience
in particular. Despite the efforts of antismoking campaigns
and legislation enacted to make cigarettes less readily available to
teens, many teen smokers are already addicted to nicotine.
The town of Rye, in New York’s Westchester County, has a small-town
sweetness to it, with an old-fashioned amusement park and a pretty,
tree-lined main street. TD’s Rye Smoke Shop, located on a central corner,
is one of the best-preserved throwbacks to past times, a dimly lit but
homey place where kids clamor for dime candy, licorice, and dipsticks.
TD’s also sells cigarettes and cigars, though not to kids under 18, in
accordance with New York State law. But that doesn’t stop them from
finding cigarettes elsewhere. Across the street at Starbucks, almost every
afternoon, you see 14-, 15-, and 16-year-olds approach one another, asking
for a smoke, for a lighter, for another cigarette. It’s their way of saying
hello, of gaining entree. “Everyone smokes,” says Candace, an openfaced
17-year-old enjoying a sunny Friday afternoon on a shop stoop.
“Kids in every clique—jocks, preps, goths. . . .”
Why light up?
So why do kids light up in the first place?
“Some friends of mine in seventh grade just said, ‘Why don’t we try
it?’” says Paul, now a sophomore. His arm draped around Candace, he’s
wearing cargo pants and is halfway through a cigarette. He’s going to be
handsome one day, but right now he’s skinny, with a rash of acne across
his chin only partly disguised by some sparse stubble. He holds a pack of
Camels prominently in his hand, like a talisman, turning it upside down,
tapping it on the sidewalk like a toy. “I thought, Well, if it’s so bad for
you, and people do it anyway, there must be something really great about
it, right?”
Paul is in a band that’s playing later at the town rec hall, and whenever
a friend walks by, he calls after him, “See you tonight, right?” Every
so often he coughs, making a harsh hacking sound. “I’m the sickliest
kid,” he admits. But he shrugs when asked if he’s worried about getting
seriously sick in the future, possibly as a result of smoking. “I’m not afraid
of cancer,” he says. “I believe in living fast and dying young.”
Parents’ influence on teen smokers
Rather than trying to free girls from concerns about their looks, a number
of state-supported antismoking campaigns advise parents to work that
angle—and point out that smoking, while it may depress weight, also
leads to more wrinkles and sallow skin. “I try to appeal to my daughter’s
vanity,” says Megan Powers, a mother of four from Westchester County,
referring to her oldest daughter, Colette. “I tell her, ‘It makes your teeth
yellow, it makes your fingers yellow.’”
The family’s relationship to cigarettes is a complicated one. Colette,
now 20, started smoking with friends about four years ago, but as she puts
it, “My dad always smoked, so my parents couldn’t get too mad.” Ironically,
Colette says that smoking actually helped her to create a bond with
her father. During a difficult time for the family—she and her parents
were arguing constantly over her failure to call when she stayed out late—
Colette says there was only one time when she could open up to her father:
when the two lit up together on the porch. Though both parents disapproved
of her smoking, her mother sensed that it wouldn’t help to
force the issue. “Was I going to ground her for smoking?” Megan Powers
asks rhetorically. “No.”