Teenage Smoking on Rise, High School Survey Finds

Teenage smoking is increasing rapidly, particularly among African American boys, according to a massive survey of more than 10,000 high school students released Thursday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In 1995, the CDC found, nearly 35% of all high school students reported smoking during the month before the survey, a figure that jumped from 27.5% in 1991. During those four years, smoking rates among black teenage boys nearly doubled, from 14% to almost 28%.

The trend among African Americans is particularly troubling to health experts, who say that it reverses a sharp decline in smoking among black youths. The only encouraging news in the survey was that smoking remained inexplicably low among African American girls, 12.2% of whom reported using cigarettes in the month before the survey.

“The problem of teen smoking is even worse than we previously believed,” said Michael Eriksen, director of the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health. “Smoking rates are increasing rapidly for all teenagers, except for black teenage girls, and what we previously thought was a success story--low rates among black high school students--is now beginning to deteriorate.”

The study, which appears in this week’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, also found that it is easy for young people to buy cigarettes, even though doing so is illegal.

More than three of four high school students who purchased cigarettes were not asked to show proof of age. More than half--57%--of those surveyed bought their cigarettes from a store, a vending machine or by giving someone else money to buy them.

Thursday’s study comes at a time of intense controversy over how to control underage use of tobacco. President Clinton has proposed regulating nicotine as a drug and imposing tough restrictions on cigarette advertising. In a statement issued by the White House on Thursday, Clinton called the report “disturbing proof that more and more young teenagers are becoming lifelong smokers and too little is being done to prevent illegal tobacco sales to them.”

The tobacco companies, however, are fighting Clinton’s plan in court. Last week, the nation’s largest cigarette manufacturer, Philip Morris U.S.A., put forth a less stringent proposal for a federal law that would enact some advertising controls in exchange for the Food and Drug Administration dropping its plans to declare nicotine as a drug.

Public health advocates and tobacco foes are strongly opposed to the Philip Morris plan and they seized on the CDC’s findings Thursday, saying that the study provides proof that tobacco advertising lures young people to smoke and that the Clinton plan is the only one that will keep cigarettes out of young hands.

“We ought to be outraged,” said the Rev. Jesse Brown, a Philadelphia minister who in 1990 helped kill plans by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. to market its Uptown cigarette directly to blacks. “I hope people become deeply incensed and understand why it is so necessary to pass the FDA regulations that will make this product a drug.”

The CDC’s findings reveal a public health paradox: While anti-smoking campaigns have made great strides in reducing smoking among adults, these same campaigns have had little effect on young people. Adult smoking dropped 20% between 1984 and 1993. And more than 90% of all people who begin smoking start before they turn 18.

Experts said that there are several reasons for the increase in teenage smoking. Some studies have found that young people no longer believe smoking is as hazardous as they once did. Others, including Eriksen, believe that as more adults reject smoking, more young people are attracted to it as a form of rebellion.

But the biggest reason for the trends, health advocates and anti-tobacco foes maintain, is cigarette advertising.

The tobacco manufacturers spend an estimated $6 billion a year on advertising and promotion. While scientists have yet to demonstrate conclusively that advertising causes young people to start smoking, there is ample evidence that teenage brand choices are influenced by advertising.

“Every time we do a study related to marketing, we find it is associated,” said John Pierce, a UC San Diego professor of cancer prevention who has conducted studies linking the rise in smoking among girls to the introduction of the Virginia Slims ad campaign.

But a spokesman for the Tobacco Institute, an industry trade group, said that peer pressure--not advertising--is to blame. “I don’t see how we could be fairly targeted with responsibility,” spokesman Walker Merryman said. “This is a social phenomenon.”