Kids antismoking campaign a failure in USA.

January 9, 2001

Free Market Foundation

A $15 million program designed to prevent school children from smoking is a bust, researchers say. The program began in September 1984, and involved children and 640 teachers in 40 school districts in Washington state. According to a report in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute:

More than a fourth of the 8,388 former school children are now regular smokers, about the same percentage as those who didn’t receive the special classes.

About 24.4 percent of girls and 26.3 percent of boys smoked by the 12th grade.

After high school, 28.42 percent of those in the experimental group smoked, compared with 29.07 percent for non-participants.

A federal survey out last week found 31.4 percent of high school seniors reported smoking at least once in the past month.

The anti-smoking program was based on a “social influences” approach to smoking prevention, including teaching skills necessary to ignore social pressures to smoke.

Source: Michelle Healy, “Anti-smoking Effort for Children is
Failure,” USA Today, December 20, 2000.

For NCI text http://rex.nci.nih.gov/massmedia/pressreleases/hutchstate.html

For more on Drug Use and Control http://www.ncpa.org/pd/social/social4.html