Teen Smoking

Every year tobacco use causes more than 430,000 deaths in this country from lung cancer and other smoking-related diseases, including emphysema, heart disease, COPD, and stroke.

Why accept a chance of losing 8,000 sunrises? ”Roughly 200,000 middle-aged smokers are expected to die from smoking related diseases this year, each an average of 22.5 years early. Is gradually smoking yourself to death committing suicide? If the world's dirtiest drug delivery device kills you, should your family consider your passing murder or an accident? You may want to attempt to explain it to them now. It might take the sting of their coming belief that you loved nicotine more than them, easier to accept once you're gone.” (John R. Polito, Nicotine Cessation Educator)

Young people are a strategically important market for the tobacco industry. Since most smokers try their first cigarette before age 18, young people are the chief source of new consumers for the tobacco industry, which each year must replace the many consumers who quit smoking and the many who die from smoking-related diseases. Preventing young people from starting to use tobacco is the key to reducing the death and disease caused by tobacco use. Philip Morris USA, America’s largest tobacco company, openly proclaims on it’s web site: “Philip Morris USA agrees with the overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that cigarette smoking is addictive.”

Fewer teenagers smoke in California than almost anywhere else in the nation - a direct result of statewide and local youth access laws, smoke-free environments, increased tobacco taxes, and a society in which smoking is no longer a social norm. In 2006, smoking rates among California high school students were 15.4% and 6.1% for California middle school students. (California Student Tobacco Survey)

Comedian Steve Martin: “I'm in a restaurant and I'm eating and somebody says, 'Hey, mind if I smoke,' I always ask, "No, mind if I fart? It's one of my habits.”

M. Joycelyn Elders, M.D., Surgeon General:

Nearly all first use of tobacco occurs before high school graduation; this finding suggests that if adolescents can be kept tobacco-free, most will never start using tobacco.
Most adolescent smokers are addicted to nicotine and report that they want to quit but are unable to do so; they experience relapse rates and withdrawal symptoms similar to those reported by adults.
Tobacco is often the first drug used by those young people who use alcohol, marijuana, and other drugs.
Adolescents with lower levels of school achievement, with fewer skills to resist pervasive influences to use tobacco, with friends who use tobacco, and with lower self-images are more likely than their peers to use tobacco.
Cigarette advertising appears to increase young people’s risk of smoking by affecting their perceptions of the pervasiveness, image, and function of smoking.
Community-wide efforts that include tobacco tax increases, enforcement of minors’ access laws, youth oriented mass media campaigns, and school-based tobacco-use prevention programs are successful in reducing adolescent use of tobacco.