Teens Take to the Stage to Fight Smoking

Every year, the American Cancer Society’s Great American Smokeout challenges smokers to quit for one day. On Thursday, the day of the Smokeout, kids from Brookhurst Junior High School in Anaheim used skits and videos to challenge elementary school students not to start.

“You don’t have to smoke to be cool,” one eighth-grader tells her captive audience of about 100 students from Gauer Elementary School in Anaheim. Another pours molasses into a large jar, demonstrating how much tar coats a smoker’s lungs in a year’s time.

The American Cancer Society reports that most smokers begin as teens, and teen smoking is up. Thus, enlisting teens to help fight the trend is an obvious move.

“It’s fun. The little kids look up to us,” said Tanya Vergara, 13, who together with 29 other eighth-graders used drama to warn against the dangers of smoking.

The idea of teens teaching through drama is the brainchild of leaders from the Orange County chapter of Camp Fire Boys and Girls, a youth organization. By the end of the year, the organization will have worked with 10 schools.

The students from Brookhurst Junior High School worked for several months creating and rehearsing the skits with their drama teacher, Autumn Browne.

Each skit includes information about smoking. “Four hundred and thirty-five thousand people die each year from smoking . . . Nicotine is addictive . . . Forty percent of teens who try to stop smoking fail,” the eighth-graders say to one another and their audience as they act out situations where teens feel pressured to smoke.

The younger students appear enraptured. They giggle at the performer choking while she smokes.

The eighth-graders have also learned lessons. One admits that she recently quit smoking. She says she liked participating in the skits because she doesn’t want to see the younger kids picking up the bad habit.

“My brother is in sixth grade and I don’t want him doing all the things that I did,” said a 13-year-old girl.

Judy Silber can be reached at (714) 966-5988