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.