Teen smoking rates stall

The CDC study on teens and tobacco advertising comes amid concerns from many in the public health community that California’s dramatic success in the fight against tobacco may be in jeopardy. As the first in the nation to launch a campaign to change the social norms around smoking in 1989, the state has been a model for what works in policy and media campaigns, and the results have been impressive. The teen smoking rate is 13.8 percent, the second-lowest rate in the nation, behind Utah’s teen smoking rate of 5.9 percent.
Teen smoking rates stall

But California’s anti-tobacco efforts are now woefully underfunded, according to the Tobacco Education and Research Oversight Committee, a state advisory committee charged with overseeing the use of Proposition 99 tobacco tax revenues for tobacco control. And after years of dazzling reductions, the decline in teen smoking in California appears to have hit a plateau.

Data from three California cities that participated in the CDC’s 2011 Youth Risk Behavior Survey – Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco – show a stunning drop in teen smoking from 1997 to 2011.
In Los Angeles, for example, 27 percent of teens smoked in 1997 and 9 percent of teens smoked in 2011. But the rates of teen smoking were unchanged in the three cities between 2009 and 2011; the CDC termed the differences in rates between those years statistically insignificant.

In the meantime, tobacco industry spending on marketing in California increased by more than 30 percent between 1998 and 2008 to reach $656 million, according to the California Tobacco Control Program, part of the state Department of Public Health. In theory, the increase in tobacco marketing should not have affected middle and high school students, because the landmark 1998 federal Master Settlement Agreement prohibited the industry from targeting youth, directly or indirectly, in advertising, marketing or promotion.

But that agreement has only made the industry more creative in how it markets to youth, said Robert Jackler, a professor of medicine at Stanford University who leads the research group Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising.

“Virtually all tobacco advertising is aimed at young people, and the reason is because almost nobody starts smoking beyond age 21 or 22,” Jackler said.

To reach students, tobacco companies have concentrated advertising and discounts in small stores, particularly those near schools, he said. “It’s an absolute carnival of tobacco products behind the check-out,” Jackler said.