Teen Smoking Rates Plunge to Single Digits in Canada
“This is the first time that it’s been in single digits, but there has been a steady decline since the 1980s,” Statistics Canada analyst Jason Gilmore said Tuesday.
The data were contained in the Canadian Community Health Survey, a major poll aimed at assessing the health of Canadians. The survey is conducted every two years.
It is based on the responses of about 130,000 Canadians aged 12 and over from every province and territory in the country. First Nations people living on reserves and members of the RCMP and the Armed Forces are not included in the survey.
The 2005 survey showed that 82 per cent of teens aged 12-17 reported they had never smoked cigarettes, up from 73 per cent in 2000-01.
The figures on teen smoking have been changing fast. An Ontario survey that is conducted every two years pegged the rate of teenagers in that province who smoked at 28 per cent in 1999, just six years before the latest Canadian Community Health Survey was conducted.
Social marketing consultant Francois Lagarde calls the sea-change in attitudes towards smoking in Canada “a huge success” built on decades of interventions, public policies and the growing science around the health risks of tobacco.
“As someone said, 40 years ago a father would give a smoke to a teenager to say ‘Now you’re a man.’ This is the last thing a father would think today,” says Lagarde, who also teaches social marketing at the University of Montreal.
“But that was happening one or two generations ago. It’s pretty amazing.”
The sharp declines in teen smoking bode well for the future health of today’s teenagers, suggesting as adults they may be at much lower risk than previous generations of developing a myriad of smoking-related diseases, including lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Like Bever, many teens cite health consequences as a major reason why they are forsaking smoking, says Edward Adlaf, director of the Ontario Student Drug Use Survey.
Data from the Ontario survey show “quite strongly . . . that we have more and more students who perceive great risk in smoking,” says Adlaf, a research scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, which runs the Ontario survey.
“So there’s been a hardening of negative attitudes and beliefs about smoking.”
Rob Cunningham, a senior policy analyst with the Canadian Cancer Society, credits a basket of public policy measures that have turned smoking from a mainstream habit to almost a fringe activity. Things like high taxes on cigarettes. Large and graphic health warnings on cigarette packs. Restrictions on where people can smoke and curbs on tobacco advertising.
“It is a success story. We’ve seen very substantial declines in smoking by adults and by kids,” Cunningham says.
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“But we have to fight every inch of the way. And we have an enormous amount of work that remains to be done.”
The message is clearly getting through to kids like Chapman and Bever.
“Well a) it’s not good for you. It’s horrible on your health. And then b) it’s not something I want to like keep doing and then have to go to the trouble of trying to quit,” Chapman says matter-of-factly.
“And obviously my parents wouldn’t be happy.”
Bever, who has a blinding smile, has her own list of smoking turn-offs.
“It’s mainly the cancer thing. And the bad breath as well. Yellow teeth - no one wants that.”
Chapman concurs: “Girls don’t really like kissing boys who’ve just been smoking. It’s not really a turn on.”
After decades of trying, it would appear that something may have taken the “cool” out of teen smoking.
“Certainly that may well be,” Adlaf admits.
“Not for all. There will still be some experimentation. I think the real key is in ensuring adolescents don’t become regular smokers.”
That’s because the teen years have typically been the time when people are most vulnerable to the marketing allure of smoking - a vulnerability the tobacco industry deliberately exploited in its drive to safeguard profits by hooking replacements for older smokers who quit or die, industry documents that were made public in the late 1990s showed.
“Hook ‘em young, hook ‘em for life,” is the industry’s approach to children, former Big Tobacco executive Dr. Jeffrey Wigand - an industry whistleblower whose case was documented in the movie The Insider - testified in public hearings on the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control at the World Health Organization.
Source: CBC.ca