Showcase Anti-Smoking Project Fails

SEATTLE (AP) - School officials are taking another look at how to
dissuade children from smoking after a 15-year, $15 million showcase
study was declared a failure.

The Warden School District, one of 40 districts in the state that
participated in the program, will keep trying to discourage youthful
smoking, but hasn't decided how, Superintendent Dennis Brandon said.

"The ... study isn't going to give us a clear direction how to do
that," Superintendent Dennis Brandon said.

More than a quarter of the former schoolchildren in the study are now
regular smokers, about the same number as those who didn't receive the
classes, according to a report in the Journal of the National Cancer
Institute.

The study involved 8,388 schoolchildren and 640 teachers and was based
on what is called a "social influences" approach.

The experiment included classes designed to help children ignore
social pressures to smoke, teach them about the dangers of smoking and
provide motivation to remain smoke-free for life. The students were
taught to resist advertising, peer pressure and poor influences at
home.

Children were targeted at the ages when smoking is commonly adopted as
a habit.

A curriculum for grades 3 through 10 was drawn up by
smoking-prevention experts at the National Cancer Institute, which
funded the research. The program met guidelines for anti-tobacco
education recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The "social-influences" approach has been favored by smoking
prevention researchers for 25 years, said Arthur V. Peterson Jr., the
lead researcher.

But Tuesday, researchers announced that surveys of the students showed
that 24.4 percent of the girls and 26.3 percent of the boys were daily
smokers by the 12th grade. That nearly mirrors the smoking habits of
students who did not participate in the study.

Two years after high school, smoking rates were even higher: 28.42
percent for those who took part in the program, 29.07 percent of those
who had not.

"It was a disappointing and surprising result to us because the social
influences approach was so attractive," said Peterson, who heads a
cancer prevention program at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research
Center in Seattle, which performed the study.

"I just think it's back to the drawing board and we need to look at
everything," he said.

He said tactics that have worked in some areas include denying
children access to tobacco by raising taxes and controlling sales, and
by countering tobacco company advertising with youth-oriented media
blitzes.

Paula Murray, whose daughter took part in the program in the Naches
Valley School District, expressed some reservations about the study.

"I don't think there was as big a push as they got older," said
Murray, whose daughter does not smoke. "They need to really push it
from the third grade to the seventh grade because after the seventh
grade it's too late."

Smoking is responsible for about 400,000 premature deaths annually in
the United States, the Centers for Disease Control says. It's
estimated that tobacco costs the nation about $50 billion a year in
health care costs. Cigarette smoking has been linked to eight types of
cancer and to heart and lung diseases.