Surgeon General Dr. Regina Benjamin unleashed another salvo against tobacco, this time aiming to stop young people from starting to smoke, with the aim to have the next generation tobacco free.
Her report, entitled Preventing Tobacco Use Among Youth and Young Adults: We Can Make the Next Generation Tobacco-Free , details the scope, health consequences and influences that lead young people to start smoking, whilst outlining proven strategies that ward young people away from tobacco.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Office on Smoking and Health will release the Surgeon General’s Video Challenge, which invites young people to develop original videos that feature one or more of the report’s findings. Details of the competition are at www.challenge.gov.
Tobacco is the top cause of preventable and premature death, killing more than 1,200 Americans every day. For each smoking-related death, two new young people under the age of 26 become regular smokers. Nearly 90 percent of these new smokers try their first cigarette by age 18. Approximately 3 out of 4 high school smokers continue to smoke well into adulthood.
HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said:
“Targeted marketing encourages more young people to take up this deadly addiction every day … This administration is committed to doing everything we can to prevent our children from using tobacco.”
The administration has taken many historic steps to protect children from the dangers of the tobacco habit, including the passage of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (TCA), which gives the Food and Drug Administration authority to regulate tobacco products to prevent use by minors. Other initiatives include quit lines, as well as web and mobile based services to help people quit.
Dr. Benjamin said :
“The addictive power of nicotine makes tobacco use much more than a passing phase for most teens. We now know smoking causes immediate physical damage, some of which is permanent … Today, more than 600,000 middle school students and 3 million high school students smoke. We don’t want our children to start something now that they won’t be able to change later in life.”
Whilst the long term effects of tobacco are well documented, the purpose of the initiative is to target young people before they start. The younger a person starts smoking, the more they are likely to become heavily addicted and they are more likely to smoke their entire lives.
Dr. Howard Koh, assistant secretary for health at HHS said :
“We can and must continue to do more to accelerate the decline in youth tobacco use … Until we end the tobacco epidemic, more young people will become addicted, more people will die, and more families will be devastated by the suffering and loss of loved ones.”
Written by Rupert Shepherd