Alarming figures on teenage smoking

By Trish Fraser

Young New Zealanders are continuing to take up smoking in large numbers despite information disseminated throughout schools on its harmful effects.

The Cancer Society published a study last year that showed that smoking among college students was rocketing. For example, more than 40 per cent of fourth-form girls smoked, up from 30 per cent in 1991.
Most young people know that smoking causes disease and death so why do they start smoking and where are we going wrong?

There is ongoing debate on this, but teenagers are risk takers. They want to experiment with anything associated with being an adult.

They see smoking as a fast track to adulthood because they see adult role models - including, in some cases, their parents - smoking.

Children as young as 4 are experimenting with smoking if they have access to cigarettes, and children of smokers are far more likely to take up smoking earlier.

Our constant pleading with young people not to take up smoking is really an open invitation to them to do so.
Call it what you like - a love of a little danger, the "forbidden fruit," the fact that adults they look up to are doing it anyway ...

Tobacco companies join our pleadings with ingenuity.
"Smoking is an adult choice. That's why we wanted the age where people can legally smoke, raised to 18 years," they say innocently.

Tobacco advertising is now banned in New Zealand, so tobacco companies moved surreptitiously into indirect tobacco advertising to counteract the ban. They continue to promote cigarettes - with clever packaging displays - next to the confectionery counters in dairies, supermarkets and service stations.

Movies continue to portray smoking as a very desirable habit. According to the British Health Education Authority the sight of a box-office name with a fag between his or her well-paid lips, is increasingly common. So it would appear that our job is a lot bigger than just educating the kids. We need the Government to take a stronger line.

A top public health expert, Professor Robert Beaglehole, has predicted that 80,000 New Zealanders will die early from the effects of tobacco products, within 20 years.

The Government should ban indirect tobacco advertising, make plain cigarette packaging mandatory, make sales of cigarettes under-the-counter items, and increase taxes on tobacco. It needs to put the price of tobacco out of the reach of children.

Government funding needs to be directed at assisting the thousands of New Zealand adults who smoke and who would like to quit. Then maybe we will have a chance to reverse the increasing trend of young people taking up smoking. It is time to stop blaming the kids and put the blame where it belongs, on the tobacco companies who encourage children to smoke, despite their protestations to the contrary.

* Trish Fraser is the director of Action on Smoking and Health (Ash) and a trustee of the Smokefree Coalition. She previously worked as a smoke-free adviser for Hutt Valley Health.