A study by a San Diego State University researcher found that cigarette sales to minors has dropped to a record low in California. The study results were announced Thursday by the state Department of Public Health, which contracted with SDSU psychology professor Elizabeth A. Klonoff to conduct the annual, federally-mandated survey. The 2011 Youth Tobacco Purchase Survey shows that 5.6 percent of the California retailers chosen randomly for the study illegally sold cigarettes to minors.

That rate was the lowest since the survey started in 1995, when 37 percent of retailers made the sale. In 2010, the rate of sales to minors was 7.7 percent.

“We are proud that fewer retailers are selling cigarettes to minors, but we have more work to do to guarantee that all kids in California grow up tobacco-free,” said Dr. Ron Chapman, director of the state Department of Public Health.

Klonoff’s study hired 15- and 16-year-old decoys to try to buy cigarettes at more than 800 stores chosen in a random sample from the 37,000 tobacco retailers in the state.

While the overall rate of sales to minors was down, results varied widely depending on the type of store.

Delis and meat markets were the biggest offenders, with 11.6 percent selling cigarettes to teen decoys, compared to 8.1 percent of supermarkets, 6.5 percent of tobacco stores, 4.9 percent of convenience stores and 1.3 percent of liquor stores.

Selling tobacco to minors is illegal in California and retailers are subject to fines ranging from $200 to $6,000.

Klonoff has done the study since 1996 and said the results didn’t surprise her, since teen smoking rates also have been in decline. “The sales data actually tracks separate data on kids’ smoking rates really well,” she said.

Klonoff said her study doesn’t show whether teens are getting cigarettes from older friends or perhaps stealing them as store clerks get savvier about not selling to minors. She said that could be the topic of a later study.

Teens enjoying the sunshine Thursday in the smoke pit near Fountain Park Pool shared a puff or two with their friends and openly discussed their nicotine habit as they pooh-poohed the idea anti-smoking campaigns work. “Everyone smokes,” said Jeffrey Runnalls, 16, a student at Outreach High School. “All my friends smoke and most have been smoking since Grade 7 or 8. I bet there’s 100 kids out smoking here every day.”

A Health Canada survey that was conducted in 2010 and released this week shows that 17 per cent of Alberta teens aged 15 to 17 smoked. That’s up five per cent from the previous year, when 12 per cent of Albertan teens said they smoked cigarettes.

The Canadian Tobacco Use survey also showed Albertan youths bucked the national trend, where only 12 per cent of teens 15 to 17 years old admitted to being smokers.

The local teens agreed several of their peers do smoke, but they were as perplexed as everyone else as to why.

“Maybe it’s because our parents smoke. My parents and my sister all smoke,” said one girl, who would not give her name.

The nameless teen, a Paul Kane Grade 11 student, said her first smoke was one she snitched in Grade 7 from her mother’s pack of cigarettes.

The girl, like many in the crowd, also admitted that she wished she’d never started.

“It costs too much money. It makes it hard to breathe. I quit once for three weeks so I could play rugby. It was too hard, so I quit rugby,” she said.

Shane Vanderkracht, also from Paul Kane, said he and several friends started smoking in Grade 7 after an older student supplied them with cigarillos.

“I think he got them from his parents,” Vanderkracht said.

None of the students near Fountain Park Pool was old enough to legally purchase cigarettes.

“We use fake ID or you get an older kid or an older sibling or sometimes our parents to get them for you,” one Grade 11 student said.

Peer pressure was the leading reason given for starting to smoke, but some of the youths speculated that all the publicity against smoking had the opposite effect upon them, and instead made them want to try it.

“I know right after we attended D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program, all of us started smoking. They gave us the stats. They gave us the knowledge. We wanted to try what they were telling us was so bad,” said Vanderkracht.

Several students agreed with Vanderkracht’s theory as one girl added, “If they didn’t make such a big deal of it all the time, maybe kids wouldn’t do it. Besides it’s cool! It’s rebellion!”

The students also speculated about why more Alberta teens appeared to be smokers compared to their national counterparts.

“I think it’s money. We have more money,” one boy said.

That particular teen also refused to give his name as he shared one cigarette with two other students. The three friends admitted that purchasing smokes was a perpetual problem. They all had jobs, which provided them with some of the cash they required to pay $11.25 per package. But they also doubted whether raising the price of cigarettes would deter teens from smoking.

“If cigarettes went up, say, to $30, there would be a riot,” said Runnalls.

Runnalls has thought about the various health risks of using tobacco products and decided cigarettes were the best choice for him.

“Chewing tobacco might give you cancer of the lip or tongue, where everyone could see it, whereas cigarettes are more likely to cause lung cancer, which can’t be seen. And cigarillos taste awful after a while, and besides, cigarettes are cheaper,” he said.

When the graphic anti-smoking art on their cigarette packages was shown to them, the smoke-pit teens were unanimous in voicing one firm idea.

“Just don’t look at them!”

“I’m more worried about cellphones giving me brain cancer,” said one Grade 12 student. “When you do a survey about cellphones, come talk to me. Then I’ll talk.”

About 37 percent of teens in Cook County suburbs have had sex, according to a survey by the Cook County Department of Public Health. The survey looked at teens’ experience with sex, drugs and violence and found some interesting, albeit somewhat sad facts. About 40 percent of teens reported having smoked cigarettes, and 33 percent say they’d smoked marijuana. About 2 percent of students said they’d tried heroin, and cocaine and ecstasy were each around 5 percent.

About 7 percent of teens said they’d been forced to have sex against their will, and 6 percent of the teens said they had sex before age 13. Public health spokeswoman Amy Poore said the study shows a need for better sex education programs in suburban Cook County schools. The Sun-Times writes:
“Most schools don’t have comprehensive sex education and are teaching abstinence only, but clearly we have a high amount of students who are engaging in sexual activity,” Poore said.
The survey also showed that within the last year, about 9 percent of teens had attempted suicide. About 13 percent of all students had considered attempting suicide.
This Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey was the first survey of its kind for suburban Cook County. We were unable to find a similar studies from previous years to see if this is an increase or decrease since previous years.

Maine has been awarded a $2.1 million three-year federal contract to help crack down on the sale of cigarettes to minors. The Maine Attorney General’s Office is scheduled to formally announce the compliance and enforcement contract during a news conference Monday morning at the Calumet Club in Augusta. A representative of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which awarded the funding, will be in Augusta that day for a forum on tobacco compliance.

Anti-tobacco efforts and cigarette tax increases drove a 64 percent decline in Maine’s teen smoking rate between 1997 and 2007. But the percentage of teens who smoke in Maine started rising again in 2009.

A group of convenience stores throughout the United States have agreed to step up efforts to stop underage tobacco sales. The Assurance of Voluntary Compliance agreement (AVC) includes 40 state attorneys general and the stores operating under the names of Circle K, Dairymart, and On The Run. Under the agreement the convenience stores will adopt specific procedures to reduce the sale of tobacco products to minors.

“This agreement will make it harder for teens to get tobacco and will keep them from a product that creates a lifelong addiction,” said Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff. “Circle K should be commended for their efforts to protect our children.”
The Circle K agreement covers 4,000 stores in 32 states. The terms include checking the ID of anyone who appears under 30 years old, restrictions on in-store advertising, and employee training that emphasizes eliminating underage tobacco sales and the health risks of tobacco use.

The agreement also acknowledges that the majority of adult smokers began smoking before 18 and that young people are less likely to be able to quit smoking. Signs of addiction begin to show after only smoking a few cigarettes.

“Fortunately the number of retailers agreeing to take a strong stand against underage tobacco sales is growing,” said Assistant Attorney General Kathy Kinsman, who worked on the agreement. The agreement is part of an ongoing, multi-state enforcement effort to implement practices that were developed by public health experts and tobacco control officials.

Physicians’ tobacco-related interactions with adolescents, including screening and advice, may help to modify teen attitudes, smoking intentions, and quitting behaviors, according to a study published online May 16 in Pediatrics. Ashley M. Hum, from the University of Memphis in Tennessee, and colleagues investigated the association between physician communication and adolescents’ attitudes to smoking.

The study included a cohort of 5,145 adolescents from an urban mid-South school system. Participants reported their attitudes toward smoking, knowledge about smoking, intentions to smoke, tobacco use, and quitting behaviors. Adolescents recalled physicians’ interventions as screening for tobacco, advice not to smoke, or both screening and advice.

The investigators found that physician advice and a combination of screening and advice was correlated with healthier attitudes toward smoking. Physician screening and advice was correlated with improved knowledge about tobacco-related damage. For current smokers, advice was correlated with a decreased intention to smoke in five years time, and these teens were more likely to plan to stop smoking in six months. The teenagers who were screened reported significantly more attempts to quit than those who were not screened or advised.

“Physician’s tobacco-related interactions with adolescents seemed to positively impact their attitudes, knowledge, intentions to smoke, and quitting behaviors,” the authors write.

Tobacco advertising hasn’t been seen on TV in decades, and in 1998 tobacco companies agreed to discontinue even more marketing practices, after 46 states alleged that tobacco companies were targeting youth with their ads. Despite the restrictions, it’s estimated that tobacco companies spend around $33 million per year advertising in Montana.

Erin Kintop, reACT Youth Empowerment Coordinator, said, “Tobacco industries have been doing a lot of targeting of teens since the 1950′s. They have had to change up their strategies a bit because of new regulations by the FDA, by really using vibrant colors, appealing advertising, tobacco products that are easily concealed in schools and at home.”

The tobacco industry has come up with new smokeless products which Kintop says target youth.

Camel, for instance, is test marketing tobacco sticks, strips, and orbs. The orbs look a lot like Tic Tacs mints, while the sticks resemble toothpicks, and the strips are much like Listerine breath mint strips.

David Howard, a spokesman for the R.J. Reynolds tobacco company, said, “We believe that these products like these, these dissolvable tobacco products, can meet societal expectations. There is no secondhand smoke. There is no spitting. And because they dissolve there is no cigarette butt litter.”

R.J. Reynolds reports that these products are not geared toward young consumers, but instead for current adult tobacco users.

But with a 16% tobacco-use rate among Montana high school students, some say that it’s just one more way to get them hooked and get them hooked early.

Olivia Holter, a senior at Helena High School, said, “I absolutely have friends who are using tobacco products. And they are mostly using it in a social way. Hookah is a huge thing in Helena right now. People will go to someone’s house at night, smoke some hookah and maybe do their homework even.”

Holter says the key to reducing underage use is education.

Last year the State spent $8.5 million on tobacco prevention, much of that on informing youth about the health risks.

CANCER Council Tasmania hopes the introduction of mandatory plain cigarette packets will reduce the state’s high teenage smoking rates. Cancer Council chief executive Darren Carr met federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon in Hobart yesterday and applauded her efforts to make Australia the first country to ban branding on cartons and packets.

Mr Carr said the latest survey of 16 and 17-year-olds in Tasmania showed 39 per cent smoked regularly, the highest level in Australia.

The level of teenage smoking interstate is declining but more Tasmanian teenagers are taking up the habit.

The latest Tasmanian survey shows 42 per cent of 16 and 17-year-old boys smoked while 37 per cent of 16 and 17-year-old girls were smokers.

The young men smoked about 21 cigarettes a week and the girls 28 cigarettes a week.

Ms Roxon said today’s teenage smokers were tomorrow’s addicted adult smokers.

“Every time you smoke a cigarette you inhale more than 4000 chemicals,” she said.

“And every cigarette you smoke brings you one step closer to cancer.”

Ms Roxon said the Federal Government was determined to press ahead with its plans to force all cigarette packages to be a plain olive green colour with images of the damage cancer causes. She said no branding would be permitted.

“If we can make smoking less attractive to teenagers, we can reduce the harm smoking does to all Tasmanians,” Ms Roxon said.

“And there is significant evidence showing plain packs make smoking much less cool for teenagers.”

Vermont teens are on a plateau — for the past five years, 16 percent of teenagers were regular smokers, according to the state Department of Health. Although the percent of smoking teens is down from 38 percent in 1995, health officials want to take cigarettes out of the mouths of more teens. To do that, anti-smoking proponents are rethinking their tactics.

The new strategy includes humor, social media and a youth-driven campaign targeting older teens who have already tried their first cigarette.

“In the long-term, we’ve been successful in reducing the numbers of youth smokers by encouraging them to never start. Now that we’ve reached a certain level, we need to go beyond traditional prevention messages, to help teens who have just started occasional smoking, but are not yet committed smokers,” Health Commissioner Harry Chen said in a statement on the health department’s website.

Scare tactics have often been used to educate teens on the dangers of smoking. In November, the Food and Drug Administration proposed requiring larger warning labels and graphic images on packs of cigarettes, including pictures of a cancer patient and diseased lungs.

But a local advocate for teens says scare tactics don’t work.

“Trying to scare these kids and threaten them to stop using anything does not really work,” said Mark Redmond, executive director of Spectrum Youth and Family Services.

With that in mind, Vermont Department of Health and Our Voices Xposed, teamed up to create an anti-smoking campaign that uses a new strategy: humor. This campaign targets older teens who find it difficult to quit once they’ve started, according to the Department of Health. Our Voices Xposed is a youth-led movement funded by the Department of Health with 14 youth groups around the state.

The campaign involves two, 30-second videos depicting teens who are dressed as a pair of lungs, a brain and a stomach. In the commercials, the “brain” begins to smoke, which prompts the “lungs” to cough and the “stomach” to vomit. The idea is to use humor while showing that smoking can have ill effects on vital organs, state health officials said.