Despite federal ban, tobacco ads continue to lure teen smokers

Despite decades of efforts to keep the tobacco industry away from children, tobacco companies are successfully promoting their products to nine out of 10 middle and high school students in the U.S., according to the study by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control.
What’s more, the dramatic decline in tobacco use among California high school students appears to have flattened out, a troubling development both because of the health effects and because tobacco use is strongly associated with failing to graduate from high school on time, according to recent research.
Twenty-nine percent of students who used tobacco failed to complete high school on time, compared to a dropout rate of 21 percent for teens who used alcohol and 25 percent for teens who used drugs, according to a study published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research.

“It’s not that tobacco causes students to do poorly in school or to leave school, but that smoking is a marker of being on a negative education trajectory,” said Joshua Breslau, lead author of the study, which he conducted while at University of California, Davis. Previous research has linked poor academic performance with smoking, said Breslau, who is now a medical anthropologist at the Rand Corporation, a research group based in Santa Monica.
“Smoking could be taken more seriously by schools,” Breslau said. “It’s a marker not necessarily of a disciplinary issue, but that a student may need help academically with grades.”
Most California school districts address tobacco use through a health curriculum.
Meanwhile, the CDC study found that students continue to be saturated with pro-tobacco messages at convenience stores, in magazines and on the Internet.
Television commercials for cigarettes are long gone, banned by federal law. Still, the study found that middle and high school students face pervasive tobacco marketing through “power wall” displays of cigarette packs in convenience stores, cigarette ads in magazines such as Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone and ESPN, and a vast number of images of cigarette smoking, tobacco chewing, cigar puffing and hookah-pipe inhaling on YouTube and elsewhere online.
“The tobacco industry has really gone underground,” said Pamela Ling, associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. “If you don’t shop at 7-11 and you aren’t online going around on YouTube, you don’t see it.”
But teenagers do see it, the study found. Some 91 percent of middle school students reported seeing pro-tobacco marketing in a store, a magazine or online, as did 93 percent of high school students. Store advertising was most often reported, with 83 percent of middle school students and 87 percent of high school students saying they saw tobacco ads there. Data were gathered from the 2011 National Youth Tobacco Survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control.
Research has established a “causal relationship” between tobacco advertising and the likelihood a teen would start smoking, according to a 2012 report from U.S. Surgeon General Regina Benjamin. Benjamin also presented a chilling equation: Of every three young smokers, one will quit and, of the remaining two, one will die from tobacco-related causes. Smoking causes multiple types of malignancies, including cancer of the lung, throat, mouth and stomach, and tobacco use remains the No. 1 cause of preventable death in the U.S.