Smokin' in the Boys (and Girls) Room

Another program that advocates hope will prevent kids from getting hooked in the first place is the American Legacy Foundation's "truth" campaign, which reaches out to teens with edgy antismoking ads. The program features pictures of low-birth-weight babies and 1,200 dead bodies outside a tobacco company's office to represent the Americans who die daily from smoking-related diseases. "[But] there isn't a sustained national media campaign for youth tobacco prevention," says Cathy Backinger, acting chief of the Tobacco Control Research Branch at the National Cancer Institute. Such a campaign would need to focus on teens' motivations for starting, and stopping. Backinger says kids cite reasons for quitting like "I quit smoking because my boyfriend didn't want me to smoke" or that they'd rather spend their money on music or clothes.

Sixteen percent of adolescents say they smoked a whole cigarette for the first time before age 13, and by the end of high school 54.3 percent of kids will have tried smoking. And yet teens aren't in the dark about the risks. "Kids know the health effects," says the NCI's Backinger. "Most kids don't think about the consequences." They know, "'I may get lung cancer 40, 50 years from now if I start smoking'," she says. "You don't think you're going to get addicted." They do it to be cool, rebellious or one of the gang. "They want to be more grown-up," she says. "One way to express being a grown-up is to do this independent thing that's an adult thing." Then they're hooked. "Kids try to quit and then find they can't," she says. "They experiment, and they think they can quit anytime."

But there are moves to squelch marketing that seems directly aimed at younger smokers. Currently the National Association of Attorneys General takes action if tobacco makers market anything directly toward kids. In October the attorneys general announced that R.J. Reynolds had agreed to a settlement that would prohibit selling cigarettes with candy, fruit or alcoholic beverage names and from giving out scratch-and-sniff ads or promotions.

Tobacco companies deny targeting teens. "We make a product that's intended for adults to smoke," says Bill Phelps, a spokesman for Philip Morris USA. "Our business is based on competing for the largest share of the adult tobacco market." Their advertising is mostly through direct mail, using adult-smoking databases of current smokers age 21 and older, and through convenience stores, says Phelps. However, they are allowed to advertise in the convenience stores that many teens frequent.

And while Philip Morris has not advertised in magazines or newspapers since 2005, its competitors do. "There's a lot of advertising in sports magazines, which boys read, and in glamour magazines, which girls read," says the ALA's Edelman. R.J. Reynolds' new Camel No. 9, with its pink packaging and "stiletto"-length cigarettes, would seem to appeal to teen girls—especially those who see the ads for it in Cosmopolitan, Glamour and Vogue.

And then there's the glamorization of smoking in movies, which has been shown to influence kids' choices. Smoking occurred in more than half of the most youth-oriented popular movies, according to reports published in the Lancet in 2003, Pediatrics in 2005 and in the Archives of Pediatric Adolescent Medicine this year. And through phone interviews with kids aged 10 to 14, Dartmouth researchers found that kids were more likely to light up if they had seen more movies with smoking. (The Dartmouth group, like many experts, would like to see the rating system changed so that smoking is forbidden in G, PG and PG-13 films.) And this year the National Academy of Sciences said exposure to smoking in movies increases the risk of starting to smoke.