California adolescents perceive smoking cigarettes to be riskier – and less socially acceptable – than they did a dozen years ago, according to a new study that comes amid a changing tobacco product landscape.
Fewer youth plan to smoke or think smoking makes them look mature, reported the study by UC San Francisco and Stanford University School of Medicine, while more teens believe that smoking is likely to trigger health problems such as heart attacks or lung cancer.
The paper examined surveys of nearly 700 students in California to assess whether there were changes between 2001 and 2015 in adolescent smoking behaviors, how youth viewed smoking, and whether they intended to smoke.
The study will be published Dec. 6, 2016, in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
“It speaks to the importance of having strong, repeated tobacco control messages that perceptions have changed in the intended direction, even with the proliferation of new tobacco products,” said first author Karma McKelvey, MPH, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education.
“Despite fears that with the advent of e-cigarettes, smoking will again be perceived as a normal activity, thereby eroding many years of tobacco control efforts, adolescent perceptions of cigarettes have actually become less favorable,” McKelvey said. “Perhaps similar strategies can be employed to help stem the rising tide of e-cigarette adoption among adolescents.”
National data have shown that adolescent smoking declined significantly between 2001 and 2015, from 23.9 percent to 7 percent, largely due to smoke-free policies and public health campaigns designed to increase knowledge about smoking risks and changing social norms.