36% of Students Who Try Cigarettes Develop Habit, Study Says
More than a third of high school students who try cigarettes develop a daily smoking habit before they graduate, the government said Thursday.
In a survey of more than 16,000 students nationwide, nearly 36% who had ever smoked said their smoking escalated to at least a cigarette per day, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
Nearly 73% with a daily habit said they had tried to quit. But only 13.5% successfully stopped, the CDC said.
“That’s strictly a testimony to the power of nicotine,” said Michael Eriksen, director of the CDC’s Office of Smoking and Health. “We were really struck by how this little drama of tobacco addiction really is completely played out before high school graduation.”
The CDC report was released as Congress debates anti-smoking legislation that would raise taxes on cigarettes and levy stiff fines against tobacco companies if teenage smoking rates fail to drop significantly.
The Tobacco Institute, the lobbying arm of the tobacco industry, had no immediate response to the study.
Seventy percent of students surveyed said they had tried cigarettes at least once. The percentage is probably higher among teenagers overall because the survey did not include dropouts, Eriksen said.
Previous studies had estimated that between 33% and 50% of people who experiment with cigarettes become regular smokers.
But now researchers can show that smokers develop a pattern of nicotine addiction and a desire to quit in their teenage years, Eriksen said.
“They started to smoke because they want an image, they want to make a statement, they get seduced by the advertising,” he said. “But after a few years they realize it is costly, it is messy, it interferes with performance and it no longer gives them the cachet it gave them when they were 12 to 13 years old.”
Students in all 50 states were surveyed in 1997. Students were considered daily smokers if they had ever smoked at least once a day for a period of 30 days. The report counted former smokers as those who had quit for at least 30 days before they were surveyed.
