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Teen Smoking Rates Remain Unchanged Since 2003

Posted on: Thursday, 26 June 2008, 16:55 CDT

Fewer youths are deciding to smoke for the first time, but efforts to reduce teen smoking rates have gone relatively unchanged over the past five years, officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday.

The agency reported only 50 percent of students have ever tried a cigarette, compared to 70 percent in 1999. However, overall smoking rates stayed stable at just under 22 percent for students aged 14 to 18 between 2003 and 2007.

CDC officials said the figures show that more work will be necessary to reaching their goal.

"We had seen this great progress from 1999 to 2003 and we were turning around this epidemic of increase in the 1990s that had everybody concerned," Terry Pechacek of CDC's Office on Smoking and Health.

"Unfortunately, that progress has not been maintained."

Judging from an annual survey of high school students conducted by the federal government, the CDC reported the percentage of students who said they had ever smoked a cigarette fell from 70 percent in 1999 to 58 percent in 2003 and 50 percent in 2007.

There were also fewer frequent smokers, with just 8 percent of students saying they smoked 20 or more cigarettes in the past month, compared to 16.8 percent in 1999.

However, the CDC reported the number of students who said they had smoked at least one cigarette in the past month remained at 21.9 percent, where it stood in 2003 after falling from 36 percent as reported in 1997.

"We are taking the emphases off of youth smoking across the nation," Pechacek said. "We have moved on to obesity, we have moved onto other issues."

The CDC did note one area of progress among black girls, where the use of cigarettes had increased from 11.3 percent in 1991 to 17.7 percent in 1999. But in 2007, that percentage dropped to 8.4, according to the report.

Pechacek said it was not clear what happened, but the trend shows that if black girls can be encouraged to quit in greater numbers, so can other high school students.

Pechacek said many state officials have wandered away from teen smoking to other social issues.

"We are taking the emphases off of youth smoking across the nation," he said. "We have moved on to obesity, we have moved onto other issues."

"The industry is putting billions of dollars into price cutting. We know that the amount of counter-marketing in our states ... has decreased since 2002-2003 and some of our biggest states have gone offline, like Florida, Massachusetts and Minnesota," he said.

Pechacek also pointed to the motion picture and video game industries, which have a dangerous trend of depicting lighting up as part of a glamorous lifestyle.

"It's kind of like mercury pollution in our fish. Smoking imagery is all over the place in DVDs, in video games. This visual world of youth is polluted with tobacco imagery. You have to take aggressive action to clean that up."

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Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports

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