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Preventing Tobacco Use Among Young People: A Report of the Surgeon General (Executive Summary)
The issue of MMWR Recommendations and Reports (Vol. 43, No. RR-4) is a reprint of the Executive Summary of the Surgeon General's report entitled Preventing Tobacco Use Among Young People, released February 1994. The report is included in the MMWR series of publications so that the material may be readily accessible to the public health community.
This Surgeon General's report on smoking and health is the twenty-third in a series that was begun in 1964 and mandated by federal law in 1969. This report is the first in this series to focus on young people. It underscores the seriousness of tobacco use, its relationship to other adolescent problem behaviors, and the responsibility of all citizens to protect the health of our children.
Since 1964, substantial changes have occurred in scientific knowledge of the health consequences of smoking and smokeless tobacco use. Much more is also known about programs and policies that encourage nonsmoking behavior among adults and protect nonsmokers from exposure to environmental tobacco smoke. Although considerable gains have been made against smoking among U.S. adults, this progress has not been realized with young people. Onset rates of cigarette smoking among our youth have not declined over the past decade, and 28 percent of the nation's high school seniors are currently cigarette smokers.
The onset of tobacco use occurs primarily in early adolescence, a developmental stage that is several decades removed from the death and disability that are associated with smoking and smokeless tobacco use in adulthood. Currently, very few people begin to use tobacco as adults; almost all first use has occurred by the time people graduate from high school. The earlier young people begin using tobacco, the more heavily they are likely to use it as adults, and the longer potential time they have to be users. Both the duration and the amount of tobacco use are related to eventual chronic health problems. The processes of nicotine addiction further ensure that many of today's adolescent smokers will regularly use tobacco when they are adults.
Preventing smoking and smokeless tobacco use among young people is critical to ending the epidemic of tobacco use in the United States. This report examines the past few decades' extensive scientific literature on the factors that influence the onset of use among young people and on strategies to prevent this onset. To better understand adolescent tobacco use, this report draws not only on medical and epidemiologic research but also on behavioral and social investigations. The resulting examination of the advertising and promotional activities of the tobacco industry, as well as the review of research on the effects of these activities on young people, marks an important contribution to our understanding of the epidemic of tobacco use in the United States and elsewhere. In particular, this research on the social environment of young people identifies key risk factors that encourage tobacco use. The careful targeting of these risk factors-
Philip R. Lee, M.D. David Satcher, M.D., Ph.D. Assistant Secretary for Health Director Public Health Service Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention
Preface from the Surgeon General U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
The public health movement against tobacco use will be successful when young people no longer want to smoke. We are not there yet. Despite 30 years of decline in overall smoking prevalence, despite widespread dissemination of information about smoking, despite a continuing decline in the social acceptability of smoking, substantial numbers of young men and women begin to smoke and become addicted. These current and future smokers are new recruits in the continuing epidemic of disease, disability, and death attributable to tobacco use. When young people no longer want to smoke, the epidemic itself will die.
This report of the Surgeon General, Preventing Tobacco Use Among Young People, delineates the problem in no uncertain terms. The direct effects of tobacco use on the health of young people have been greatly underestimated. The long-term effects are, of course, well established. The addictive nature of tobacco use is also well known, but it is perhaps less appreciated that early addiction is the chief mechanism for renewing the pool of smokers. Most people who are going to smoke are hooked by the time they are 20 years old.
Young people face enormous pressures to smoke. The tobacco industry devotes an annual budget of nearly $4 billion to advertising and promoting cigarettes. As this report so well describes, there has been a continuing shift from advertising to promotion, largely because of banning cigarette ads from broadcast media. The effect of the ban is dubious, however, since the use of promotional materials, the sponsoring of sports events, and the use of logos in nontraditional venues may actually be more effective in reaching target audiences. Clearly, young people are being indoctrinated with tobacco promotion at a susceptible time in their lives.
A misguided debate has arisen about whether tobacco promotion "causes" young people to smoke -- misguided because single-source causation is probably too simple an explanation for any social phenomenon. The more important issue is what effect tobacco promotion might have. Current research suggests that pervasive tobacco promotion has two major effects: it creates the perception that more people smoke than actually do, and it provides a conduit between actual self-image and ideal self-image -- in other words, smoking is made to look cool. Whether causal or not, these effects foster the uptake of smoking, initiating for many a dismal and relentless chain of events.
On the brighter side, a large portion of this report is devoted to countervailing influences. We have the justification: there is a substantial scientific basis for primary prevention of cigarette smoking and smokeless tobacco use. A number of successful prevention programs, based on the psychological and behavioral factors that create susceptibility to smoking, are available. We have the means: the report defines a coordinated, effective, nonsmoking public health program for young people. And we have the will: schools, communities, legislatures, and public opinion all testify to the growing support for encouraging young people to avoid tobacco use.
The task is by no means easy. This report underscores the commitment all of us must have to the health of young people in the United States. Substantial work will be required to translate the justification, the means, and the will into a world in which young people no longer want to smoke. I, for one, relish the task.
M. Joycelyn Elders, M.D. Surgeon General
CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION, SUMMARY, AND CHAPTER CONCLUSIONS
Previous Surgeon General's reports on tobacco use and health have largely focused on the epidemiologic, clinical, biologic, and pharmacologic aspects of adult use of tobacco products. This report on Preventing Tobacco Use Among Young People provides a more detailed look at adolescence, the time of life when most tobacco users begin, develop, and establish their behavior. Because regular use soon results in addiction to nicotine, this behavior may persist through adulthood, significantly increasing, through the extended years of use, the risk of long-term, severe health consequences.
Despite three decades of explicit health warnings, large numbers of young people continue to take up tobacco; currently, over three million adolescents smoke cigarettes, and over one million adolescent males currently use smokeless tobacco. Clearly, effective interventions are needed to prevent more young people from trying tobacco. To achieve significant long-term reductions in tobacco use and tobacco-related deaths in the United States, we must examine the nature and scope of adolescent tobacco use, consider the social, psychological, and marketing factors that influence young people in their decision to use tobacco products, and evaluate current efforts to prevent young people from becoming users. This report addresses the crucial problems of adolescent tobacco use.
Development of the Report
This report of the Surgeon General was prepared by the Office on Smoking and Health, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, CDC and Prevention, Public Health Service, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as part of the department's responsibility, under Public Law 91-222 and Public Law 99-252, to report current information on the health effects of cigarette smoking and smokeless tobacco use to the United States Congress. This report is the first to focus on the problem of tobacco use among young people. Given the continuing onset of use in adolescence and the growing evidence of health consequences associated with early use, the report was seen as both needed and timely.
The current report has been produced through the efforts of experts in the medical, pharmacologic, epidemiologic, developmental, economic, behavioral, legal, and public health aspects of smoking and smokeless tobacco use among young people. Initial manuscripts for the report were prepared by 28 scientists who were selected for their expertise in specific content areas. This material was consolidated into chapters, each of which underwent peer review. The entire document was reviewed by a number of experts in the field, as well as by institutes and agencies within the U.S. Public Health Service. The final draft of the report was reviewed by the Assistant Secretary for Health and by the Secretary, Department of Health and Human Services.
Several concerns guided the development of this report. The first, which is addressed in Chapter 2, is whether tobacco use is associated with health consequences during the period of adolescence (broadly defined as ages 10 through 18, although research cited in this report varies somewhat in the ages considered adolescent). The long-term health consequences -- that is, those that emerge in adulthood -- have been the subject of extensive review and are widely acknowledged in the scientific and public literature. The chapter thus focuses on the serious health consequences, as well as the increased risk factors for subsequent health consequences, that are evident early in life among young smokers and smokeless tobacco users. Chapter 3 examines the epidemiologic patterns of tobacco use among the young. National data on trends in adolescent use are analyzed to determine the extent of the current problem, as well as to note changes in patterns of initiation and use. The factors that influence adolescents in their decision to use tobacco are examined in Chapter 4, which considers psychosocial risk factors, and Chapter 5, which examines the influence of tobacco advertising and promotion. The final concern, the focus of Chapter 6, was to assess what has been done -- from the individual level to the legislative level -- to prevent tobacco use among young people.
The health effects of cigarette smoking have been the subject of intensive investigation since the l950s. Cigarette smoking is still considered the chief preventable cause of premature disease and death in the United States. As was documented extensively in previous Surgeon General's reports, cigarette smoking has been causally linked to lung cancer and other fatal malignancies, atherosclerosis and coronary heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and other conditions that constitute a wide array of serious health consequences (USDHHS 1989). More recent studies have concluded that passive (or involuntary) smoking can cause disease, including lung cancer, in healthy nonsmokers. In 1986, an advisory committee appointed by the Surgeon General released a special report on the health consequences of smokeless tobacco, concluding that smokeless tobacco use can cause cancer and can lead to nicotine addiction (USDHHS 1986). In the 1988 report, nicotine was designated a highly addictive substance, comparable in its physiological and psychological properties to other addictive substances of abuse (USDHHS 1988). Considerable evidence indicates that the health problems associated with smoking are a function of the duration (years) and the intensity (amount) of use. The younger one begins to smoke, the more likely one is to be a current smoker as an adult. Earlier onset of cigarette smoking and smokeless tobacco use provides more life-years to use tobacco and thereby increases the potential duration of use and the risk of a range of more serious health consequences. Earlier onset is also associated with heavier use; those who begin to use tobacco as younger adolescents are among the heaviest users in adolescence and adulthood. Heavier users are more likely to experience tobacco-related health problems and are the least likely to quit smoking cigarettes or using smokeless tobacco. Preventing tobacco use among young people is therefore likely to affect both duration and intensity of total use of tobacco, potentially reducing long-term health consequences significantly.
Health Consequences of Tobacco Use Among Young People
Active smoking by young people is associated with significant health problems during childhood and adolescence and with increased risk factors for health problems in adulthood. Cigarette smoking during adolescence appears to reduce the rate of lung growth and the level of maximum lung function that can be achieved. Young smokers are likely to be less physically fit than young nonsmokers; fitness levels are inversely related to the duration and the intensity of smoking. Adolescent smokers report that they are significantly more likely than their nonsmoking peers to experience shortness of breath, coughing spells, phlegm production, wheezing, and overall diminished physical health. Cigarette smoking during childhood and adolescence poses a clear risk for respiratory symptoms and problems during adolescence; these health problems are risk factors for other chronic conditions in adulthood, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death among adults in the United States Athero-sclerosis, however, may begin in childhood and become clinically significant by young adulthood. Cigarette smoking has been shown to be a primary risk factor for coronary heart disease, arteriosclerotic peripheral vascular disease, and stroke. Smoking by children and adolescents is associated with an increased risk of early atherosclerotic lesions and increased risk factors for cardiovascular diseases. These risk factors include increased levels of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, increased very-low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, increased triglycerides, and reduced levels of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol. If sustained into adulthood, these patterns significantly increase the risk for early development of cardiovascular disease.
Smokeless tobacco use is associated with health consequences that range from halitosis to severe health problems such as various forms of oral cancer. Use of smokeless tobacco by young people is associated with early indicators of adult health consequences, including periodontal degeneration, soft tissue lesions, and general systemic alterations. Previous reports have documented that smokeless tobacco use is as addictive for young people as it is for adults. Another concern is that smokeless tobacco users are more likely than nonusers to become cigarette smokers.
Among addictive behaviors such as the use of alcohol and other drugs, cigarette smoking is most likely to become established during adolescence. Young people who begin to smoke at an earlier age are more likely than later starters to develop long-term nicotine addiction. Most young people who smoke regularly are already addicted to nicotine, and they experience this addiction in a manner and severity similar to what adult smokers experience. Most adolescent smokers report that they would like to quit smoking and that they have made numerous, usually unsuccessful attempts to quit. Many adolescents say that they intend to quit in the future and yet prove unable to do so. Those who try to quit smoking report withdrawal symptoms similar to those reported by adults. Adolescents are difficult to recruit for formal cessation programs, and when enrolled, are difficult to retain in the programs. Success rates in adolescent cessation programs tend to be quite low, both in absolute terms and relative to control conditions.
Tobacco use is associated with a range of problem behaviors during adolescence. Smokeless tobacco or cigarettes are generally the first drug used by young people in a sequence that can include tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, and hard drugs. This pattern does not imply that tobacco use causes other drug use, but rather that other drug use rarely occurs before the use of tobacco. Still, there are a number of biological, behavioral, and social mechanisms by which the use of one drug may facilitate the use of other drugs, and adolescent tobacco users are substantially more likely to use alcohol and illegal drugs than are nonusers. Cigarette smokers are also more likely to get into fights, carry weapons, attempt suicide, and engage in high-risk sexual behaviors. These problem behaviors can be considered a syndrome, since involvement in one behavior increases the risk for involvement in others. Delaying or preventing the use of tobacco may have implications for delaying or preventing these other behaviors as well.
The Epidemiology of Tobacco Use Among Young People
Overall, about one-third of high-school-aged adolescents in the United States smoke or use smokeless tobacco. Smoking prevalence among U.S. adolescents declined sharply in the 1970s, but this decline slowed significantly in the 1980s, particularly among white males. Although female adolescents during the 1980s were more likely than male adolescents to smoke, female and male adolescents are now equally likely to smoke. Male adolescents are substantially more likely than females to use smokeless tobacco products; about 20 percent of high school males report current use, whereas only about 1 percent of females do. White adolescents are more likely to smoke and to use smokeless tobacco than are black and Hispanic adolescents.
Sociodemographic, environmental, behavioral, and personal factors can encourage the onset of tobacco use among adolescents. Young people from families with lower socioeconomic status, including those adolescents living in single-parent homes, are at increased risk of initiating smoking. Among environmental factors, peer influence seems to be particularly potent in the early stages of tobacco use; the first tries of cigarettes and smokeless tobacco occur most often with peers, and the peer group may subsequently provide expectations, reinforcement, and cues for experimentation. Parental tobacco use does not appear to be as compelling a risk factor as peer use; on the other hand, parents may exert a positive influence by disapproving of smoking, being involved in children's free time, discussing health matters with children, and encouraging children's academic achievement and school involvement.
How adolescents perceive their social environment may be a stronger influence on behavior than the actual environment. For example, adolescents consistently overestimate the number of young people and adults who smoke. Those with the highest overestimates are more likely to become smokers than are those with more accurate perceptions. Similarly, those who perceive that cigarettes are easily accessible and generally available are more likely to begin smoking than are those who perceive more difficulty in obtaining cigarettes.
Behavioral factors figure heavily during adolescence, a period of multiple transitions to physical maturation, to a coherent sense of self, and to emotional independence. Adolescents are thus particularly vulnerable to a range of hazardous behaviors and activities, including tobacco use, that may seem to assist in these transitions. Young people who report that smoking serves positive functions or is potentially useful are at increased risk for smoking. These functions are associated with bonding with peers, being independent and mature, and having a positive social image. Since reports from adolescents who begin to smoke indicate that they have lower self-esteem and lower self-images than their nonsmoking peers, smoking can become a self-enhancement mechanism. Similarly, not having the confidence to be able to resist peer offers of tobacco seems to be an important risk factor for initiation. Intentions to use tobacco and actual experimentation also strongly predict subsequent regular use.
The positive functions that many young people attribute to smoking are the same functions advanced in most cigarette advertising. Young people are a strategically important market for the tobacco industry. Since most smokers try their first cigarette before age 18, young people are the chief source of new consumers for the tobacco industry, which each year must replace the many consumers who quit smoking and the many who die from smoking-related diseases. Despite restrictions on tobacco marketing, children and adolescents continue to be exposed to cigarette advertising and promotional activities, and young people report considerable familiarity with many cigarette advertisements. In the past, this exposure was accomplished by radio and television programs sponsored by the cigarette industry. Barred since 1971 from using broadcast media, the tobacco industry increasingly relies on promotional activities, including sponsorship of sports events and public entertainment, outdoor billboards, point-of-purchase displays, and the distribution of specialty items that appeal to the young. Cigarette advertisements in the print media persist; these messages have become increasingly less informational, replacing words with images to portray the attractiveness and function of smoking. Cigarette advertising frequently uses human models or human-like cartoon characters to display images of youthful activities, independence, healthfulness, and adventure-seeking. In presenting attractive images of smokers, cigarette advertisements appear to stimulate some adolescents who have relatively low self-images to adopt smoking as a way to improve their own self-image. Cigarette advertising also appears to affect adolescents' perceptions of the pervasiveness of smoking, images of smokers, and the function of smoking. Since these perceptions are psychosocial risk factors for the initiation of smoking, cigarette advertising appears to increase young people's risk of smoking.
Efforts to Prevent the Onset of Tobacco Use
Most of the U.S. public strongly favors policies that might prevent tobacco use among young people. These policies include mandated tobacco education in schools, a complete ban on smoking by anyone on school grounds, further restrictions on tobacco advertising and promotional activities, stronger prohibitions on the sale of tobacco products to minors, and increases in earmarked taxes on tobacco products. Interventions to prevent initiation among young people -- even actions that involve restrictions on adult smoking or increased taxes -- have received strong support among smoking and nonsmoking adults.
Numerous research studies over the past 15 years suggest that organized interventions can help prevent the onset of smoking and smokeless tobacco use. School-based smoking-prevention programs, based on a model of identifying social influences on smoking and providing skills to resist those influences, have demonstrated consistent and significant reductions in adolescent smoking prevalence; these program effects have lasted one to three years. Programs to prevent smokeless tobacco use have used a similar model to achieve modest reductions in initiation of use. The effectiveness of these school-based programs appears to be enhanced and sustained, at least until high school graduation, by adding coordinated communitywide programs that involve parents, youth-oriented mass media and counteradvertising, community organizations, or other elements of adolescents' social environments.
A crucial element of prevention is access: adolescents should not be able to purchase tobacco products in their communities. Active enforcement of age-at-sale policies by public officials and community members appears necessary to prevent minors' access to tobacco. Communities that have adopted tighter restrictions have achieved reductions in purchases by minors. At the state and national levels, price increases have significantly reduced cigarette smoking; the young have been at least as responsive as adults to these price changes. Maintaining higher real prices of cigarettes provides a barrier to adolescent tobacco use but depends on further tax increases to offset the effects of inflation. The results of this review thus suggest that a coordinated, multicomponent campaign involving policy changes, taxation, mass media, and behavioral education can effectively reduce the onset of tobacco use among adolescents.
Smoking and smokeless tobacco use are almost always initiated and established in adolescence. Besides its long-term effects on adults, tobacco use produces specific health problems for adolescents. Since nicotine addiction also occurs during adolescence, adolescent tobacco users are likely to become adult tobacco users. Smoking and smokeless tobacco use are associated with other problem behaviors and occur early in the sequence of these behaviors. The outcomes of adolescent smoking and smokeless tobacco use continue to be of great public health importance, since one out of three U.S. adolescents uses tobacco by age 18. The social environment of adolescents, including the functions, meanings, and images of smoking that are conveyed through cigarette advertising, sets the stage for adolescents to begin using tobacco. As tobacco products are available and as peers begin to try them, these factors become personalized and relevant, and tobacco use may begin. This process most affects adolescents who, compared with their peers, have lower self-esteem and self-images, are less involved with school and academic achievement, have fewer skills to resist the offers of peers, and come from homes with lower socioeconomic status. Tobacco-use prevention programs that target the larger social environment of adolescents are both efficacious and warranted.
Following are the specific conclusions for each chapter of this report:
Chapter 2. The Health Consequences of Tobacco Use by Young People
Chapter 3. Epidemiology of Tobacco Use Among Young People in the United States
Chapter 4. Psychosocial Risk Factors for Initiating Tobacco Use
Chapter 5. Tobacco Advertising and Promotional Activities
Chapter 6. Efforts to Prevent Tobacco Use Among Young People
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CDC. Reducing the health consequences of smoking: 25 years of progress -- a report of the Surgeon General. Rockville, MD: US Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, 1989; DHHS publication no. (CDC)89-8411.
Public Health Service. The health consequences of using smokeless tobacco: a report of the advisory committee to the Surgeon General. Rockville, MD: US Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Services, National Institutes of Health, 1986; DHHS publication no. (NIH)86-2874.
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