SNUFFING OUT SMOKING: TEENS TELL WHAT WORKS

TO HEAR 15-year-old Dianna Eckhardt tell it, the tobacco bill that died on
Capitol Hill last week could have gone a long way toward keeping teenagers
from becoming lifelong smokers.

Actually, Dianna hasn't been following the tobacco bill debate per se --
``I'm really not interested in government and stuff like that,'' she says
- -- but she's convinced the only way to keep kids from smoking is to make
cigarettes too expensive and too difficult to buy. Those are the two
reasons Dianna quit smoking before her sophomore year at Pioneer High
School in San Jose. And the tobacco bill would have raised the price of a
pack of cigarettes by $1.10 while tightly regulating who could purchase them.

Dianna says her friends at Pioneer would still be smoking a pack a day even
if all the ``come to flavor country'' advertising stopped tomorrow. Her
assessment: ``You start smoking to be a part of something -- and a lot of
the time you keep smoking because you're bored. Joe Camel really has
nothing to do with it.''

Since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported this spring
that smoking among high school students rose from 27.5 percent in 1991 to
36.4 percent in 1997, the anti-smoking crusaders have gotten panicky about
how they can counteract cigarettes' appeal among prepubescent rat-pack
wannabes. For all the gruesome classroom film strips of yellow teeth and
black lungs, cigarettes have a cool quotient that's still synonymous with
everything about being adult. And when you're in a rush to be world-weary,
dragging on a Marlboro looks like a pretty good shortcut.

``I started out smoking Newports,'' Dianna said. ``Then I switched to
Virginia Slims, and I guess that was partially because of the advertising.
Then I went to Marlboros and finally I ended up smoking Camels. But I
smoked them because they were less tar-ish. At that point I was in eighth
grade and I wasn't aware of being influenced by advertising at all. It was
just something to do with my friends.''

That's how it played out for Angela Therault, too. Angela just graduated
from Pioneer, but she quit smoking when she was a freshman. Both she and
Dianna spent the past year talking to kids at middle schools, trying to
persuade them not to smoke. But they knew preaching to eighth-graders
wasn't the way to make an impression. They had to make a convincing case
against it.

``We just give them the facts and tell them to make their own decision,''
Angela said. ``It's not like there's that much peer pressure about smoking
or not. I think a lot of kids do it because it's easy. So you try and tell
them it's just as easy not to.''

As far as Dianna is concerned, it got to be much easier not to smoke than
to stoke her butt habit.

``I got bored with smoking because it was so expensive and, in my
neighborhood, it was just really hard to get cigarettes,'' she said. ``You
had to find someone older who'd go in and get them for you or who would
drive you to someplace where you knew they wouldn't ask for your ID. And it
became this huge ritual that was such a pain. It was easier to just blow
off the whole thing.''

San Mateo County officials have already figured this out. This month county
supervisors enacted an ordinance requiring merchants to get a tobacco
license that can be revoked if store owners sell cigarettes to minors. The
law applies only to unincorporated communities, but it's a start.

``Getting to kids in middle school is really the key -- making sure they
can't buy cigarettes when they're 13,'' Dianna said. ``Because by the time
you get to high school and you've been smoking for a couple years, it's
sort of become who you are. It's part of your identity. And that's a lot
harder to give up than cigarettes.''

Checked-by: Richard Lake