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December 14, 2007
The good, the bad and the ugly (about smoking)At first, BoardBuzz was pleased to see the results of the University of Michigan’s 2007 Monitoring The Future study released earlier this week, showing a 33 percent decline in teen cigarette use between 2001 and 2007. Wow! Digging just a little deeper, however, it appears that while there was a decline in smoking among 8th graders for the first time in four years, there has been no significant change in smoking rates for 10th or 12th graders during that same period. Other recent surveys also indicate that smoking declines have stalled among youth and adults.
The decline in youth smoking that occurred in the last decade indicates that we know how to reduce students’ smoking, but the stalled progress in more recent years is a clear warning to resist complacency. With the national smoking rate for adults still hovering above 20 percent, it is important to continue to fight this pediatric disease: four out of five smokers start before the age of 18!
Even more troubling is the fact that while states cut funding for tobacco prevention, tobacco industry marketing has gone from $6.9 billion in 1998 to $13.4 billion in 2005, according to the most recent Federal Trade Commission report on tobacco marketing. That makes our lungs hurt just thinking about it.
BoardBuzz knows that healthy students are students who stay in school and who achieve, and smoking is no way to stay healthy. Unfortunately, while our nation has made remarkable progress in reducing smoking in recent decades, this battle against the leading preventable cause of death is far from won. Tobacco-free school policies are an important contribution schools can make to reducing tobacco use by young people. For more information on the Center for Disease Control’s guidelines for 100 percent tobacco-free school policies, click here.
Posted December 14, 2007 1:06 PM | Health & Wellness
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Comments(2)
Posted by: Shana on December 18, 2007 11:43 AM
"Even more troubling is the fact that while states cut funding for tobacco prevention, tobacco industry marketing has gone from $6.9 billion in 1998 to $13.4 billion in 2005, according to the most recent Federal Trade Commission report on tobacco marketing."
Wow! Very sobering indeed. Thanks for the information!
Posted by: expert on December 20, 2007 7:21 AM
National Institute for Drug Abuse (NIDA) has a whole list of programs that work to reduce drug use among children. Unfortunately, effective, evidence-based programs are displaced by programs that are selected based on politics (DARE), personal philosophies (peer counseling), and popularity (boot camps). It is time we threw out the ineffective programs and started offering ONLY evidence-based programs in our schools.
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