Teen Smoking Falls Again
NEW YORK Suspicious-minded readers will wonder what vices teenagers are indulging in to take up the slack. Others will simply be pleased by newly released research from the Monitoring the Future project, based at the University of Michigan, finding that the incidence of teenage cigarette smoking is near record lows.
Based on surveys of students in grades 8, 10 and 12, “monthly prevalence” of smoking (i.e., smoking at all in the 30 days before being questioned) fell from 13.6 percent in 2007 to 12.6 percent this year. The monthly prevalence was 7 percent among 8th graders, 12 percent among 10th graders and 20 percent among 12th graders.
The year-to-year decline was greatest in the upper grades, according to the university’s report of the findings. Since the mid-1990s, smoking among 8th graders has fallen by two-thirds, while it’s down by “more than half” among 10th graders and by “nearly half” among 12th graders.
The decline in prior-month smoking stems partly from the fact that more and more kids have never tried cigarettes at all. “The proportion of 8th graders who ever smoked a cigarette is down from 49 percent in 1996 to 21 percent in 2008,” says the university’s report.
One significant finding: 83 percent of the 8th graders, 80 percent of the 10th graders and 75 percent of the 12th graders “prefer to date people who don’t smoke.”
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Tags: Teen Smoking