HealthDay Reporter
TUESDAY, Dec. 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Cigarettes are one accessory today’s California teens are more than willing to forego, a new survey finds.
Fewer of them than ever think cigarettes are cool, the study found, and many view smoking as riskier and less socially acceptable than they did about a decade ago.
This finding mirrors what’s happening across the nation, where cigarette smoking among teens has declined greatly over the past two decades. The drop is largely the result of smoke-free policies and public health campaigns that highlighted the harms of smoking, the researchers said.
That’s the good news. On the flip side, teens are turning to e-cigarettes, hookahs, cigars and chewing tobacco to get their nicotine fix, according to the authors of a new study.
“Adolescents are still not aware of the addictive properties of nicotine,” said lead researcher Bonnie Halpern-Felsher. She’s a professor of pediatrics in the division of adolescent medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine in California.
Nicotine is more addictive to the developing brain, Halpern-Felsher said. “Because of how nicotine affects the brain, teens are more likely to become addicted than [other people] and have a harder time quitting,” she said.
The change in attitudes toward cigarettes is largely due to aggressive tobacco control efforts and health messaging “that have changed the perceptual landscape around cigarettes,” Halpern-Felsher said.
“We need to pay more attention to the addictive properties of all tobacco products. We need to talk about nicotine and not just cigarettes,” she explained.
“We need to apply the same messages we had about cigarettes to e-cigarettes and other products, and the [U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] should be focusing more messages on addiction and short-term health risks of these products,” Halpern-Felsher suggested.
In two surveys — one in 2001 and the other in 2015 — the researchers collected data from a total of nearly 700 California high school students to see how attitudes toward smoking had changed over the years.
The results showed a decrease in the number of teens that plan to smoke or think smoking makes them look mature, while more teens believe that smoking is likely to cause health problems, Halpern-Felsher said.
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