Students Use Peer Pressure to Douse Teen Smoking

On the day Layza Lopez had her sixth birthday party, her father, only 35, clutched his chest in pain and was rushed to the hospital with a heart attack.

He survived, but was told he must quit the smoking habit he picked up as a youth if he wanted to avoid further damage to his health. He did stop, and it made an impression that Layza, now 17, never forgot.

“It was the first true sign that smoking was bad, if my father stopped doing it,” Lopez said.

She has since become a warrior in the campaign to head off other teens from developing an addiction to nicotine that can devastate them later in life.

She is a pest around her smoking friends, a blunt messenger of the ways smoking is just so uncool. And she is not alone.

In California, more than any other state, social pressure against lighting up has filtered to young people. That, along with costs and other factors, is driving smoking rates among teenagers to the lowest levels on record.

In 2001, only 5.9% of youths 12 to 17 reported smoking a cigarette in the previous 30 days, according to newly released data from the California Department of Health Services.

That compares to 11% in 1994, the first year such surveys were conducted.

California is leading a national trend that finds smoking rates falling sharply among teenagers, after a rise during the early 1990s.

Nationally, 28% of high school students say they have smoked in the last month, down from 36% in 1997, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Experts attribute the decline to higher cigarette prices, removal of Joe Camel-like tobacco advertising that appealed to young people and creative anti-smoking campaigns that deglamorize the activity.

A growing number of young people like Layza Lopez are involved in education programs designed by teens for teens.

“Kids have come to see a number of drugs as dangerous in the last several years; peer norms are changing,” said Lloyd D. Johnston, a principal investigator at the University of Michigan Institute of Social Research, which recently produced a national survey charting the decline in teen smoking.

“Also, during the time that Congress was considering tobacco legislation, there was a great deal of exposure of what was going on in the tobacco industry and kids saw themselves as being manipulated.”

California has pioneered legislation limiting smoking in public places, chilling the climate for smokers of all ages. More young people in the state grow up in an environment that is far less tolerant of secondhand smoke and in homes where nonsmoking parents do not pass along the habit.

The issue of youth smoking is generating intense interest. In an effort to influence more youths, state Assemblyman Paul Koretz (D-West Hollywood) recently introduced legislation to raise the legal age for purchasing tobacco from 18 to 21, after such a move was endorsed by the California Medical Assn.

A Superior Court judge last week found that the R.J Reynolds Co.--makers of brands such as Camel, Winston and Salem--had violated the terms of the 1998 tobacco settlement prohibiting magazine ads aimed at teens, and fined the company $20 million.

Researching Addiction

Experts say that many youngsters are still too easily lured into taking that first puff. And, compared to adults, they say, it is just as hard, maybe harder, for teenagers to kick the habit.

New medical research is finding that adolescents can develop cravings after a few draws and become addicted within weeks. According to a University of Massachusetts study, they are far more likely than others to fail in efforts to quit. According to the American Lung Assn., 67% of teens who smoke say they want to quit and 70% wish they had not started. Researchers are trying to find out if physiology may play a role.

Gevorg Kbulchyan, 17, and a senior at Los Angeles’ Francisco Bravo Medical Magnet High School, says he dreams of waking up one day and not having cravings, of finishing a meal or a movie and not reaching for a pack. At his peak, he would go through 25 to 30 cigarettes a day, not thinking of eating.

He’s been caught on campus a few times, recently with a lighter, and had to attend mandatory smoking education classes. If caught with tobacco, students face suspension, transfer and even court fines.

On a previous occasion, he had to watch a video of people with diseased lungs hooked up to a breathing machine.

Then he got a chest infection and an X-ray revealed that his own lungs were affected.

“The doctor asked me if I smoked, but I wouldn’t admit it in front of my mom,” Kbulchyan said.

He made a resolution to cut back on nicotine, but he has not yet won the battle. He started smoking when he was 14, influenced, he said, by a family of smokers.

“It’s not something you’re proud of,” Kbulchyan said. “When you start, you don’t think it’s going to affect you.” He puckers his nose and adds, “Sometimes I smell my jacket and think, ‘How can people stand me?’ ”

On another day and in another room at Bravo, volunteers from the Regional Youth Consulting Firm--a group sponsored by the Proposition 99-funded tobacco control organization L.A. LINK--are taking the fight to its source, planning their own media campaign to counter tobacco marketing.

They’re not happy with their Internet site, comparing it poorly to the flashy Web site of tobacco giant Brown & Williamson. “I thought the whole point was to outdo big tobacco,” one girl said.

The youth group developed a series of radio and television ads dubbed the Toxic Comedy Campaign and enlisted professional comedians to help them make their point. Their commercials refer to the tobacco companies by name and end with the tag line “You’re killing us ... (Really).” The spots, which have aired on radio and youth-oriented cable stations such as MTV, BET and the Comedy Channel, have been nominated for awards and this month will be presented to a Swedish government delegation as a model.

But the students now are concerned about whether their group can survive. Fewer smokers means reduced revenues from Proposition 99 cigarette taxes to fund anti-smoking programs. In addition, Gov. Gray Davis has proposed cutting $46 million from the state’s tobacco control budget.

“As long as we make a dent and let them know that we’re out here, we feel like we’re achieving something,” said Lopez, who has taken her zeal to the point of boycotting Kraft food products because it is owned by Philip Morris.

The youths talk about talk about how easy it is for youngsters to be seduced by images that appear grown-up and sophisticated.

“When I was smaller, my sister and I used to think the tobacco ads were so cool; we would hold crayons and pretend we were smoking,” said Evelyn Orellana, a 16-year-old Bravo sophomore who says she’s never smoked.

In East Los Angeles, the students in Operation Store Front--an elective peer education program--take their anti-tobacco case to local convenience stores and service stations, asking managers to pledge they will not sell cigarettes to anyone under 18.

On a recent afternoon, about 15 Roosevelt High School students marched to confront managers at a nearby gas station that displayed a large red-and-white Marlboro sign in the driveway and on the pumps and a Kool sign at the checkout stand. Visible tobacco ads are illegal within 1,000 feet of schools, playgrounds and other sites that children frequent.

The students handed the perplexed cashier a memo signed by all the students seeking a meeting with the manager.

Teacher Susana Reynoso said some stores take down signs but tell her that cigarette companies come and put them back up. Still, the students have kept up the pressure.

“Most of the stores around the high school have taken down signs, and they no longer sell cigarettes to minors,” Reynoso said. “The kids really enjoy what they’re doing, and it’s working. The stores get nervous when they see us coming.”

In 1998, 46 states and major tobacco companies entered into an agreement that restricts tobacco advertising and promotion and requires companies to fund ads discouraging young people from smoking.

Mixed Messages

Tobacco makers contend they are doing their part to dissuade children from smoking. Philip Morris, for example, created a separate department devoted to youth smoking prevention that reports directly to its chief executive. Howard Willard, senior vice president in the department, said the company rigorously tests its ad campaigns with focus groups of youngsters and parents to ensure they are getting across the message. In addition, the company says it does not do product placement in movies, is working with retail stores to reduce the visibility of cigarettes and has reduced its magazine advertising spending by 50%.

The American Journal of Public Health devoted its entire June issue to youth smoking and tobacco marketing. Studies cited in the journal found that industry-produced advertisements to discourage smoking--such as the Philip Morris “Think. Don’t Smoke” campaign--are not effective at reducing youth smoking.

In contrast, ads produced by anti-smoking groups, funded by the tobacco settlements, were found to be far more effective.

In addition, experts are troubled by the pull exerted on teens when popular actors such as Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts light up on screen.

Although the movie industry has challenged the notion that such exposure promotes smoking, researchers at Dartmouth Medical School in a recent study concluded that children who viewed the most smoking images in movies were more likely to have smoked.