After more than a decade of decline, Maine’s teen smoking rate is on the rise. That is cause for concern — and more investigation to find out what’s behind the upswing and what is the most effective way to reverse it. These efforts will be helped by a $750,000 federal grant that the state received earlier this month. In 1997, Maine had one of the highest teen smoking rates in the country when 39 percent of high school students said they were smokers. Through a variety of steps — including increases in the state’s tobacco tax, millions spent on anti-smoking education and tougher laws against selling cigarettes to minors — the rate dropped by 14 percent in 2007.

Then it jumped to 18 percent, according to data from the Maine Youth Behavioral Risk Survey. The survey was changed to include a larger sample in 2008. The survey that year included more high schools, including in more rural areas, so this could explain some of the jump in smoking rates.

State officials also say a new generation of teens may be more accepting of higher cigarette prices because they didn’t experience a time when a pack sold for less before taxes were raised. Maine last increased its tax — from $1 to $2 a pack — in 2005. Between 2001 and 2007, when the average price of a pack of cigarettes went from $3.53 to $5.28, Maine’s teen smoking rate dropped from 25 percent to 14 percent.

On the other hand, others speculate that the economic hard times — and the accompanying stress — could account for more teen smoking.

It would be good to know the reason behind the rise in smoking rates so that anti-smoking efforts carry the most effective message. Maine currently spends about $11 million a year in federal and state money on smoking prevention and cessation. Unlike many other states that have used the money — much of it from tobacco companies as part of a national settlement — to balance their budgets or to fund other programs, Maine has remained committed to earmarking funds for tobacco-related work.

Reducing youth smoking is important for health and economic reasons.

Eighty-five percent of people who begin smoking before the age of 19 become lifelong smokers, according to the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In Maine, more than $600 million is spent annually on health care expenditures to treat tobacco-related illnesses and more than $530 million is lost in productivity because of smoking, according to the national Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids.

Maine is one of the first states to receive a competitive grant from the Food and Drug Administration to increase the enforcement of state and federal tobacco laws. Under the contract administered by the Maine Office of the Attorney General, the state Department of Health and Human Services will receive more than $750,000 to increase enforcement of federal and state tobacco laws.

This, and a closer look at which prevention efforts work, could help reverse this troubling trend.

From bangordailynews.com, June 25, 2010

Alberta is second-worst in Canada when it comes to refusing tobacco sales to teenagers.
That’s the warning from the province’s Action on Smoking and Health organization. What’s worse, the group says, significantly more Alberta stores are willing to break the law than just a few years ago.
“Alberta is the only province without any provincial legislation to curb youth access to tobacco,” says Stuart Adams, the group’s provincial spokesperson. “We believe that this omission is contributing to higher smoking rates among young people.”

Undercover “shoppers” found 17 per cent of Alberta’s retailers were willing to sell tobacco products to under-age customers illegally last year, the group reported, compared with 10 per cent in 2006. In British Columbia, just six per cent of the retailers broke that law.
And Alberta storekeepers were second-worst when it came to selling to older-looking 17-year-olds, without asking for photo ID, the group said. Yet Alberta is one of the best when it comes to halting liquor sales to people under 18.
“We would like to see the controls on tobacco sales brought more in line with controls on retail liquor sales in Alberta,” said Adams.
Alberta’s gaming and liquor commission is already responsible for enforcing sections of the provincial Tobacco Reduction Act as well as the Tobacco Tax Act, he points out. But it has no control over tobacco sales to minors.
“Alberta can do a better job of protecting kids from the predatory marketing practices of the tobacco industry,” says Les Hagen, executive director for Action on Smoking and Health.
Teens are the highest-risk group for starting to smoke, he points out.
“The industry is trying to entice kids to use its deadly products through candy flavourings, price discounts, colourful packaging and ‘slim’ cigarettes,” Hagen said. “We need to counter these objectionable marketing practices with strong laws to prevent more kids from falling prey to the tobacco companies.”
While the Alberta government had no immediate response to the group’s recommendations, a federal agency has announced plans to counter the increase in teen smoking in this province. Health Canada will spend more than $800,000 to create a “culturally sensitive” awareness campaign aimed at First Nations youth, recognizing tobacco’s ceremonial role in native culture.
That task will be undertaken by personnel at the University of Alberta, where another project will see more than 1,600 of the province’s health-care providers offered tobacco reduction and cessation training. Potentially 600,000 Alberta smokers will be asked about their tobacco use and advised of its serious risks to health and life expectancy.

From lethbridgeherald.com, June 18, 2010

The greatest victory of my father’s political career was his 1997 landmark settlement victory over big tobacco. Against all odds, Gov. Lawton Chiles helped settle the score against this dangerous industry by bringing in a windfall worth $13 billion over the first 25 years to benefit the people of Florida.

The tobacco settlement included funds to curb tobacco use, and during the Chiles administration, hundreds of millions of dollars were devoted to hitting back at Joe Camel and empowering teens through the Students Working Against Tobacco program. As a result, teen smoking dropped more than 20 percent during this period. SWAT later became a national model for the national TRUTH anti-smoking campaign.

Unfortunately, after my father left the scene, his successors bowed to pressure from the tobacco industry and dramatically cut smoking-cessation budgets to as little as $1 million per year – about 5 cents per Floridian.

Moreover, they dismantled the SWAT teen engagement efforts, and as a result, progress in curbing teen-smoking rates stalled. Florida’s leaders abandoned the needs of their people because of the lure of big tobacco’s money.

This year’s outrage is HB 5309, an unconscionable effort to further gut Florida’s smoking-cessation efforts. For more than 10 years, Florida’s smoking-cessation program has been housed in the Florida Department of Health, creating partnerships between local public health agencies, advocacy groups, coalitions and the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.

HB 5309, however, would take this responsibility out of the hands of experienced DOH coordinators and instead move the program to the Department of Children & Families – the massive state agency that has zero experience administering a tobacco program and already has its hands full managing Florida’s foster care program.

Moreover, HB 5309 will transfer most of Florida’s tobacco control budget – $9 million out of $11 million – away from local community-based smoking-cessation partnerships.

Florida legislators would not have to raid the state’s smoking-cessation budget if they simply had the will to force all Florida cigarette companies to make payments to offset state Medicaid costs. Former Attorney General Bob Butterworth – who fought alongside Gov. Chiles to make Florida’s victory over big tobacco a reality – has said Florida could collect up to $70 million if it properly charged nonsettling tobacco manufacturers.

That revenue could reach nearly $200 million if the state applied those funds to Medicaid, which draws down federal matching funds. That would more than provide for Florida’s needs to fund an effective tobacco-control program, but Florida lawmakers have so far failed to act.

According to the U.S. CDC, Florida is already falling behind in making the investments it needs to run an effective community-smoking-cessation program. HB 5309 no doubt has big tobacco salivating over the opportunity to hook potentially millions of new Floridians on cigarettes by gutting Florida’s smoking cessation outreach model – which in the past has been a nationally recognized model of success – and instead taking Florida back to square one.

Florida cannot afford to continue down this dangerous path. If we refuse to invest in success, we will instead pay for failure. It will be Florida taxpayers who will bear this burden by paying their hard-earned tax dollars to fund Medicaid costs to treat sickness caused by big tobacco’s cigarettes.

Floridians deserve better, and we need to muster the leadership to reject HB 5309, to get SWAT going again, to adequately fund our community intervention programs and to make Florida a better place for ourselves and for our children.

By BUD CHILES, Theledger

They bear the names “Wild Honey” blunt wraps and “Peppermint” snus, but they are not the latest confections from Willy Wonka.

They are part of an effort by tobacco companies to market products to adolescents and teenagers, said Judith Coykendall at Partners for Clean Air, a Seven Hills Behavioral Health program in New Bedford.

“They smell delicious,” she said, reaching into her American Cancer Society tote bag, which she calls her “bag of poisons,” to pull out the cheerfully colored packets of “blunt wraps,” which look to the undiscerning eye like fruit rollups and come in enticing flavors — watermelon, strawberry, blueberry and “sexual chocolate,” the wrapper of which features a pair of bare female legs dripping with what appears to be melted chocolate.

Snus are marketed on the Camels website as a “smoke-free, spit-free” product and come in intriguing flavors, such as “frost” and “mellow.” According to the American Cancer Society website, snus are commonly used in Scandinavia as quitting aids. The clinical-sounding “Nicogel,” which looks exactly like a portable hand wipe and absorbs through the skin, is also marketed as a quitting aid.

However, Coykendall said she is concerned that what might help alleviate a seasoned smoker’s cravings might also get a young person hooked for the first time. After all, she said, although most teenagers have heard that smoking is bad for their health, nicotine and tobacco are harmful whether smoked or not.

“Their natural assumption is that, if it doesn’t have smoke, it doesn’t have the dangers,” Coykendall said. According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, smokeless tobacco can still increase risk of mouth or nasal cancer and cause high blood pressure. Then there is the risk of becoming addicted to nicotine, Coykendall said, which leads to smoking.

According to the National Institute for Drug Abuse, “The amount of nicotine in smokeless tobacco is three to four times greater than that delivered by a cigarette.” The nicotine also stays in the bloodstream longer.

In 2009, largely because of smoking bans and anti-smoking campaigns, cigarette use among high school students in Massachusetts fell to 16 percent, an almost 20 percent reduction since 1995. However, according to the same study, released by the Department of Public Health and the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, sales of cigars and smokeless tobacco products in Massachusetts, like the Snus, have surpassed sales of regular cigarettes among minors in the last year, at 17.6 percent, a steady increase since 2003.

Over the past year, Nic Charest, director of the Greater New Bedford Tobacco Control Program, said he has seen these alternative tobacco products gain in popularity throughout New Bedford, Fairhaven and Dartmouth.

Charest works with a dozen high school students in Greater New Bedford, ages 15 to 17, to do compliance checks on the sale of cigarettes, part of a state initiative to make sure that stores are not selling tobacco-related products to minors — those under 18. In a carefully planned sting, the students try to buy cigarettes without producing identification.

State law requires retailers to ask for an ID if a customer appears to be under 27. “If they’re successful” buying cigarettes, Charest said of his undercover crew, “we have enforcement that we’ll follow up on.”

Over the past few years, Charest said, tobacco sales to minors took place at 13 percent of the stores in Greater New Bedford, although that number dipped to 5 percent last year.

There might be a bright side for concerned anti-smoking advocates: A lot of teenagers around here haven’t yet heard of products such as snus or Nicogel. In a room filled with teens at the Boys & Girls Club of New Bedford, no one nods when asked whether they have friends who use snus.

Cameron Lewis, an eighth-grader at Keith Middle School, and Katherine Sullivan, a 10th-grader at New Bedford High School, have parents who smoke, but neither uses tobacco.

Coykendall, however, said it might only be a matter of time for the trend to catch on.

“The tobacco industry had to come up with a product that could get their sales up tremendously,” she said.

Alesha Gilbert and Markus Watson, both juniors from BMC Durfee High School in Fall River, have participated in Teaching Against Drug Abuse, an extracurricular program in Fall River that surveyed 49 stores that sell tobacco, looking at marketing rather than compliance.

Watson said he discovered that in most of the stores, the ads were placed at a 3-foot eye level.

“So it’s not really targeting adults,” he said. “Because most adults are not 3 feet tall.”

Asked what makes her friends buy cigarettes, Gilbert said, “I think it’s whatever is cheap. Whatever you can get your hands on.”

According to information from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, the price difference between cigarettes and snus is significant. Camel’s frost-flavored snus, for instance, which come in a pack of 12, cost less than $4. Cigarettes cost at least $9 a pack.

Coykendall said these products fall into a legal “loophole” in which they are not subject to the state’s cigarette tax. Nor do they fall under the state’s ban on flavored cigarettes.

She also said the packaging for these products is attractive and enticing. Plus, snus dissolve in the mouth, making it hard to detect in school.

“If I used tobacco, I can imagine I would probably turn to another tobacco product that’s more concealable so that I can get my nicotine for the day,” Watson said. “Like kids who have to go through that eight-hour day and are not allowed to smoke.”

Is nicotine consumption in class that easy?

“Like texting isn’t allowed, but somebody manages to do it anyway,” Gilbert said.

By ALEXIS HAUK, Southcoasttoday

Sixteen years ago, Victor DeNoble testified before Congress about the addictive qualities of nicotine and how his research was suppressed by the tobacco industry.

These days, the scientist travels the country telling students about the harmful effects of cigarettes and other tobacco products. He delivered the message Monday to 400 students attending two assemblies at Pitman High School.

The former whistle-blower will speak at Turlock High School on Friday as well as schools in San Joaquin County this week as part of the Kaiser Permanente “Don’t Buy The Lie” anti-smoking program. Kaiser has run the program in Sacramento-area schools for 17 years and extended the campaign to the Northern San Joaquin Valley this year.
DeNoble, a former researcher for Philip Morris, said federal officials were holding him in protective custody in 1994, when seven tobacco industry executives told a congressional committee that cigarettes were not harmful to the millions of smokers in the United States.

“I would tell Congress that nicotine changes the structure of this,” DeNoble told the Pitman students, holding up a small jar containing the brain of a lab rat.

He made the students squirm by giving them a close-up look at the rat brain, a monkey brain and human brain, all of which showed the effects of repeated exposure to nicotine, he said.

As with all addictive drugs, nicotine changes the function of the brain’s dopamine system, DeNoble said. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that produces feelings of contentment and is associated with addiction.

DeNoble, a behavioral pharmacologist, was researching drug addiction at the University of Minnesota in 1979 when cigarette maker Philip Morris offered him a job. According to DeNoble, company officials told him their products killed 138,000 people a year, and they wanted him to develop a drug to replace nicotine in cigarettes.

Besides being addictive, nicotine has been shown to have adverse effects on the cardiovascular system.

Assigned to a research lab in Richmond, Va., DeNoble and a colleague conducted nicotine studies with lab animals and were involved in developing a safer cigarette for Philip Morris. However, DeNoble said, company officials declined to use the nicotine substitute because it would look like an admission tobacco products had harmed smokers for decades.

Philip Morris fired DeNoble in 1984 and prevented him from publishing his research. A secrecy agreement he had signed kept him quiet for 10 years, but he became the first tobacco- industry whistle-blower to testify before Congress in the 1990s.

These days, he travels to many states giving his “Inside the Dark Side” talks to students.

A Philip Morris spokesman said Monday that it had no comment on the content of DeNoble’s presentations.

DeNoble told the Pitman students that the developing brains of young people are sensitive to addictive drugs such as nicotine. Despite limits on tobacco advertising, the industry targets young people with colorful ads in magazines and has no way of excluding minors from Internet chat rooms for smokers, he said.

Caleb Porter, a Pitman sophomore, said Monday’s assembly was fascinating.

“He has a very interesting story, sort of like an epic movie,” he said, adding that smoking is not for him. “I have no desire to try it.”

The “Don’t Buy The Lie” program includes a contest in which high school students design posters with anti-smoking messages. The grand prize winner gets a $1,000 gift card and his or her anti-smoking message put on billboards in the Central Valley. Runners-up receive $50 gift cards.

By Ken Carlson, Modbee

A new study has revealed that the more teenagers see cigarette ads, the greater they are at risk of taking that first puff.

According to the study, the particular content of tobacco marketing resonates with youth and that the vivid imagery in tobacco advertising captures their interest, although teens typically are more resistant to the promotional seduction of other products.

“Cigarettes have created a brand for every personality trait,” study lead author Reiner Hanewinkel, Ph.D., director of the Institute for Therapy and Health Research in Kiel, Germany, said.

“If you are looking to project independence and masculinity, think of the lonely cowboy in the Marlboro ads.

“On the other hand, if you’re looking to project a desire for romantic relationships, and friendships are playing a role, then you will choose Lucky Strike if you are a man and Virginia Slims if you are a woman,” Hanewinkel, who collaborated with Dartmouth Medical School, added.

Kids with high exposure to tobacco advertising were twice as likely to have tried smoking and three times as likely to have smoked in the past month, compared to those with low exposure.Exposure to tobacco advertising also was associated with higher intent to smoke in the future among the never-smokers, suggesting that it affects how adolescents perceive smoking even before they start.

The study has relevance for the United States and other nations with partial advertising bans similar to Germany’s restrictions.

The 2008 survey involved 3,415 German schoolchildren, ages 10 to 17, in rural and urban areas.

Students saw images (with all the writing and brand logos removed) of six cigarette ads and eight commercial products such as clothing, cars, candy and detergent.

With the brand information missing, researchers measured adolescents’ ad recognition by applying psychological assumptions about attention and memory.

They inquired about how frequently students had viewed each ad image and asked about smoking habits and intentions.

“We were amazed at how often they had seen the images and could correctly recall the cigarette brand,” study collaborator James Sargent, M.D., a professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth, said.

“For example, 55 percent had seen the Lucky Strike image and almost one quarter correctly decoded the brand,” he stated.

After analysing the data, the researchers assessed how likely non-smokers were to try smoking.

Researchers classified survey participants as current smokers if they reported smoking at least once a month.

“This is a well-done study. They controlled for all the things they needed to control for,” Stanton Glantz, Ph.D., director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco, said.

The study appears online and in the April issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

The more that teens see cigarette ads, the greater their risk of taking a puff.
A new study shows that the particular content of tobacco marketing resonates with youth and that the vivid imagery in tobacco advertising captures their interest, although teens typically are more resistant to the promotional seduction of other products.

“Cigarettes have created a brand for every personality trait,” said study lead author Reiner Hanewinkel, Ph.D., director of the Institute for Therapy and Health Research in Kiel, Germany.

“If you are looking to project independence and masculinity, think of the lonely cowboy in the Marlboro ads,” added Hanewinkel, who collaborated with Dartmouth Medical School. “On the other hand, if you’re looking to project a desire for romantic relationships, and friendships are playing a role, then you will choose Lucky Strike if you are a man and Virginia Slims if you are a woman.”

Kids with high exposure to tobacco advertising were twice as likely to have tried smoking and three times as likely to have smoked in the past month, compared to those with low exposure. Exposure to tobacco advertising also was associated with higher intent to smoke in the future among the never-smokers, suggesting that it affects how adolescents perceive smoking even before they start.

The study, which appears online and in the April issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, has relevance for the United States and other nations with partial advertising bans similar to Germany’s restrictions.

The 2008 survey involved 3,415 German schoolchildren, ages 10 to 17, in rural and urban areas. Students saw images (with all the writing and brand logos removed) of six cigarette ads and eight commercial products such as clothing, cars, candy and detergent.

With the brand information missing, researchers measured adolescents’ ad recognition by applying psychological assumptions about attention and memory. They inquired about how frequently students had viewed each ad image and asked about smoking habits and intentions.

“We were amazed at how often they had seen the images and could correctly recall the cigarette brand,” said study collaborator James Sargent, M.D., a professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth. “For example, 55 percent had seen the Lucky Strike image and almost one quarter correctly decoded the brand.”

After analyzing the data, the researchers assessed how likely nonsmokers were to try smoking. Researchers classified survey participants as current smokers if they reported smoking at least once a month.

“This is a well-done study. They controlled for all the things they needed to control for,” said Stanton Glantz, Ph.D., director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research & Education at the University of California, San Francisco. Among the outside variables was whether a parent or peers smoke.

“It’s a nice contribution to the literature showing that cigarette advertising is very powerful,” Glantz said, noting the strong link between the amount of ad exposure and the level of youth response.

3 per cent increase in 15-19 age group, StatsCan reports
More teenagers in Quebec are turning to smoking – a troubling new development that raises questions about whether the provincial government has gone far enough to curb tobacco use among youth, experts say.

The latest survey on smoking by Statistics Canada shows that in Quebec, one in five teens age 15 to 19 lit up last year – an increase of three per cent from 2008.

By comparison, the national smoking rate for that age group declined to 14 per cent from 15 per cent.

What’s more, 11 per cent of Quebec children up to the age of 11 said that they were exposed to second-hand smoke at home, compared with five per cent for the whole country.

“Something is attracting teenagers to smoking,” said Marc Drolet, a spokesperson for the Quebec division of the Canadian Cancer Society.

“There was a downward trend for the past 10 years, and now for some reason, the trend has probably reversed. Unfortunately, we are now the Canadian champions in that (smoking age) category.”

Drolet conceded that the government has taken some strong anti-smoking measures to date, like banning it in bars and restaurants. But he urged Quebec to do more to curb subtle marketing campaigns by tobacco companies aimed at youth.

Karine Rivard, press attaché to Health Minister Yves Bolduc, defended the government’s anti-smoking initiatives and said that more were planned for this year.

She noted that Quebec has banned the sale of single cigarillos with grape and other flavours that had been popular with some teens.

“The government intends to continue to intensify the fight against tobacco,” Rivard said. She declined to describe some of the proposed anti-smoking measures.

The survey did contain some good news, however. The prevalence of tobacco use in an older age group of Quebecers – 20 to 24 – dropped to 25 per cent last year from 31 per cent for the corresponding period in 2008.

Smoking is considered the main cause of avoidable cancer globally, killing more than 5 million people each year.

Tobacco use has been linked to 85 per cent of cases of lung cancer and is responsible for 30 per cent of all cancers, according to the Canadian Cancer Society. In Quebec, 7,400 Quebecers received a diagnosis of lung cancer last year and 6,500 died from that illness.

The Canadian Tobacco Use Monitoring Survey is carried out semi-annually and is based on a survey of more than 9,000 respondents. The latest survey was for the months of February to June 2009.

By AARON DERFEL, The Gazette

Vienna. Austria has the highest percentage of 15-year-old smokers, 25 per cent, in Europe, according to a Vienna doctor. Manfred Neuberger, the head of the preventive-medicine division at Vienna Medical University, added the number of Austrian youth who smoked had been steadily increasing since 1997 and that 145,891 Austrians aged 11 to 17 smoked.

Noting the average age at which young people began smoking had fallen to 11, he said: “The younger one begins, the worse the consequences will be.”

Neuberger claimed the government had been doing too little to get young people not to smoke. “It is easier to buy cigarettes than groceries,” he said, adding the government should use the 60 million Euros in cigarette taxes that young smokers paid annually to pay for a prevention campaign.

Neuberger called protection of non-smokers in Austria “a health and poli- tical time bomb” and said the country was on the level of the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Hungary, Albania and Serbia in that regard. The doctor cited polls in Styria and Upper Austria that had shown 91 per cent of people who visited nightspots felt harmed by secondary smoke and 60 per cent of them wanted the law on smoking toughened.

Tamas Fazekas from Vienna’s St. Anna Children’s Hospital called for “an absolute ban on smoking in public areas. We are already finding illnesses in children that previously occurred only in adults.” She warned that pregnant women’s exposure to secondary smoke could lead to premature births and development of asthma in young children. She also claimed exposure of children to secondary smoke made it more likely they would start smoking and noted 80 per cent of children of smokers became smokers themselves.

The doctors’ announcements came on the occasion of an event promoting the EU campaign “HELP – For a Smoke-Free Life” in Vienna. The campaign featured more than 300 events in all 27 EU member states yesterday.

By Lisa Chapman
05.11.2009 Wienerzeitung

A Seattle-based study has found an improved way to trim teen smoking.

That improvement is small, but significant.

A type of phone counseling posted a 4 percentage point higher success rate than a control group to get teens to quit smoking, a Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute study concluded.

The results were published Monday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Acknowledging that a 4 percent improvement is small, Arthur Peterson Jr., one of the researchers, said this is the first time that such an experiment to get teens to quit smoking has shown a solid increase in positive results.

The bottom line is that the new approach being tested showed a 21.8 percent success rate in getting high school seniors to quit smoking for six months, compared with a control group’s success rate of 17.7 percent.

“This shows there is still a lot to do. … There is clearly a need to take the next step to see how the smoking intervention can be improved,” Peterson said.

Washington’s Department of Health estimated that 70,000 teens smoke in the state with 45 beginning each day. The state’s 2008 estimate for high school sophomores is that 23 percent smoke.

A Hutchinson news release said 26.5 percent of all high school seniors smoke at least once a month and that 13.5 percent smoke at least 10 cigarettes a day.

Here is how the study worked.

Hutchinson set up a study of 2,151 teen smokers plus 745 nonsmokers — all seniors who were first contacted as juniors — among 50 Washington high schools to get teens to discuss their attitudes about smoking. The study had control groups and measures to weed out unwanted extra influences on the participants’ actions.

The study included phone surveys in 2008.

If a student brought up wanting to quit, the researcher on the other end of the phone would not directly tell the youth to quit, but would draw out the student opinions in a nonjudgmental way. Within those limits, the researcher offered tips on understanding motivations and behaviors.

The researchers theorized that non-pressure approach on a one-to-one basis encouraged teens to make their own decisions to quit.

Peterson said future steps should include a duplicate of this experiment to see if it gets similar results.

And researchers should keep tabs on the first study group to see how the quitters fared beyond six months, he said.

This study’s findings could be used by quit-tobacco phone counseling operations across the nation, Peterson said.

Washington’s Department of Health operates such a line at 1-800-QUIT-NOW.
John Stang can be reached at 206-448-8030 or johnstang@seattlepi.com.
Seattlepi

A research study by the National Organization of Mothers of Twins Clubs, Inc. (NOMOTC) which focused on “Multiples in Extra-Curricular Activities” found that 84% of the parents surveyed first enrolled their multiples in extra-curricular activities between the ages of 4 and 5.

Once multiples started into elementary school, parents answering the NOMOTC survey reported choir/music and soccer as the most popular school-related activities, while summer camp and swimming were listed as the most popular activities outside of school. Parents also reported that most of the time, their multiples participated together in activities. The greatest challenge in having two or more on the same team, according to the NOMOTC research, was having one multiple who was better than the other in an activity.

However, research now suggests another challenge for these parents of multiples, as well as parents of single-born children. While participation in sporting activities can certainly reap some health benefits, research shows sports participation loses out to the impact of movies when it come to the issue of teen smoking.

In fact, the study, which was published in the July issue of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine and cited in an article by US News and World Report, says that 30 percent to 50 percent of teen smokers connect their habit with seeing the stars “light up” in movies.

Statistics from Kansas and Oklahoma show significant numbers of Midwestern teens are taking a chance on tobacco. The 2007 Kansas Youth Risk Behavior Survey reported that 21 percent of Kansas high school students smoke as compared to a rate of 18 percent for Kansas adults. And Oklahoma’s numbers are even higher with 42 percent of high school students and 21 percent of middle school students reporting that they either smoke cigarettes or use other tobacco products. These numbers give Oklahoma the distinction of being among the 10 worst states percentage-wise for adolescent smoking.

What can parents do? Considering the impact of movies on teen smoking, parents can work to monitor the movies being viewed by their children. Websites promoting movies currently in theatres can offer information concerning the movie’s rating and sometimes a glimpse at selected scenes. The website, scenesmoking.org, also offers feedback concerning the use of tobacco in the week’s top 10 movies. If you’re planning to rent a movie for home viewing, the website, smokingsides, provides reviews of movies released in previous years.
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