Be Cool, Be Glamorous, Be Dead : A disturbing increase in teen-age smoking turns up in survey

During most of the 1980s, cigarette consumption in the United States fell, reflecting growing public awareness that smoking promotes diseases and shortens lives. That decline, however, may now have been arrested. The newest evidence suggests that a key reason for the change may be an alarming rise in the number of young smokers.

A survey funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse finds smoking among teen-agers up sharply, especially among eighth-graders, for whom a 30% increase was recorded between 1991 and 1994. At the high school senior level, 19% said they smoked daily.

What accounts for this unhealthy increase? Adolescents, of course, tend to be natural contrarians. Besides, teen-agers feel as remote from the prospect of smoking-related illnesses or death in middle age or later as they do from the Civil War.

To simple perversity add the wish to emulate entertainers and other cultural icons who smoke. Joseph A. Califano, a former secretary of health, education and welfare and now chairman of the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, noted that “in the 1930s and 1940s we glamorized smoking, and now we have an epidemic of lung cancer and heart disease.” He added, “I think we’re beginning to glamorize it again.” As evidence of that, health researchers point to the number of young television and movie stars who are regularly seen puffing away in photographs and news videotapes.

If such celebrities help to promote smoking, then maybe the best form of counterattack is to enlist the help of similarly glamorous young nonsmokers to drive home the message that smoking is not cool but stupidly self-destructive. Today’s young smokers are the next generation’s premature-death statistics. That truism needs constant repetition.