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Cigarette smoking rates among American teens in 2008 are at the lowest levels since at least as far back as the early 1990s, according to the Monitoring the Future study based at the Institute for Social Research, which has been surveying national samples of eighth-, 10th- and 12th-grade students each year since 1991.
Monitoring the Future tracks tobacco use with surveys administered to a national sample of more than 45,000 students in about 400 secondary schools each year. This year represents the low-point for smoking in all three grades. The proportions of students indicating any smoking in the prior 30 days (called monthly prevalence) stands at 7 percent, 12 percent and 20 percent in grades eight, 10 and 12, respectively.
These rates reflect large declines since the recent peaks in the mid-1990s: eighth-graders’ smoking rates are down by two-thirds, 10th-graders’ by more than half and 12th-graders’ by nearly half.
“I can’t begin to tell you what a dramatic difference this is going to make in the health and longevity of this generation,” says Lloyd Johnston, the study’s principal investigator. “The fact that teen smoking is still declining is particularly encouraging, because a couple of years ago it looked like the long decline in youth smoking might be coming to an end.”
The investigators note that in the early 1990s, cigarette smoking was making a rapid comeback among American teens, one to which the study drew considerable public attention. Many governmental and other institutional responses to the growing threat followed, perhaps the most important of which was the tobacco settlement between the industry and the state attorneys general.
That settlement brought about some immediate changes in cigarette advertising in the country, including the termination of the Joe Camel ads, and it launched the American Legacy Foundation, which has sponsored national antismoking ad campaigns aimed at youth in the years since.
