Teens Know Better, but Smoke Anyway

Jane looked around at her high school classmates and said in a whisper that she bought her first pack of cigarettes when she was 9 and shared them with a friend.

Both she and her friend had older brothers who smoked, she said, “so we just wanted to see what it was like.”

Since then the brother she looked up to “got into drugs from cigarettes,” she said, and her father, also a smoker, “got throat and lip cancer.”

Jane, who is 15, wants to quit, like her mother did recently. But, asked if she thought she would still be smoking in five years, she resignedly said: “I have no idea.”

About a third of American teen-agers do some smoking or use chewing tobacco, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. They also have found that twice as many white high school students smoke as black students, and that the number of black students who smoke has dropped significantly since 1976, while the number of whites who smoke has leveled off.

Gary Giovino, chief epidemiologist at the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health in Atlanta, said the reasons for the racial disparity are still unclear and must be studied more.

It could be caused by a greater sensitivity among blacks to the increased cost of cigarettes, which now run about $1.50 a pack, Giovino said, or the influence of the church in black communities. Another reason, he said, may be found in surveys showing that black girls are less concerned about weight control than white girls.

Jane, who asked that her real name not be used, is a freshman at Mamaroneck High School, in an affluent town north of New York City. More than 80% of the students are white. Three-quarters of the class of 1992, which includes 10 National Merit Scholarship semifinalists, are college bound.

Jane was one of 10 Mamaroneck High students to meet in a counselor’s office on a recent morning to talk about teen-age smoking. Six of the 10 smoke.

The group estimated that at least 40% of the student body smokes.

Students can smoke on the school grounds but not in buildings. Most smoke between classes in the “Wind Tunnel,” a covered, outdoor passageway that is littered with cigarette butts.

“I think a lot of it is pressure from their peer groups. . . . A lot of it is when they see smoking at home,” said Anne Deware, coordinator of the school district’s drug and alcohol awareness program. “And the whole attitude of adolescence, of ‘It’s not going to happen to me. I won’t get hurt. I’ll be able to stop.’ ”

She has focused on students with drinking and drug problems, she said, because their addictions “really affect their functioning in school.”

“Smoking I sort of put on a back burner, feeling guilty about it all the time,” Deware added. But recently she enlisted the help of the American Lung Assn., which organized a smoking cessation clinic to meet at lunchtime.

Jane has signed up. So has John, a 17-year-old senior who also asked that his real name not be used.

“It’s really stupid. It is hurting yourself,” said John, who started smoking the summer before his freshman year and has tried to quit. “I will probably wind up getting this big tumor on my lungs.”

“If current patterns of cigarette use continue, 5 million of the kids alive today will die from smoking-attributable diseases,” Giovino said.

Youngsters smoke for many reasons, he said. But he heaps much of the blame on the tobacco industry.

“Tobacco billboards pair smoking--something addictive and damaging to your health--with images that are very appealing, images that are sexy in some cases; cool, slim and macho in other cases. And after a while, when you pair those things often enough, the negative thing can take on the positive attributes that it is being paired with.”

Some advertisements appear to directly target youngsters, although the tobacco industry denies that. A recent study showed that 6-year-olds are as familiar with “Old Joe Camel,” a cartoon character in ads for Camel cigarettes, as they are with Mickey Mouse.