WE'RE LOSING THE TEEN-SMOKING FIGHT

To win the War on Tobacco, anti-smoking strategists have long insisted, the
focus must be on teens.

Smokers, after all, start young. According to the surgeon general's 1994
report, the average age at which American smokers first try cigarettes is
14-1/2. The average age at which they become daily smokers is 17-1/2.
"Nicotine addiction is a pediatric disease that often begins at 12, 13, and
14," says David Kessler, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug
Administration and staunch enemy of the tobacco industry, "only to manifest
itself at 16 and 17, when these children find they cannot quit."

To fight this "pediatric disease," the sale of cigarettes to minors has
been made illegal in every state. Tobacco ads have been banned from
television and radio, and eliminated from publications and shows aimed
primarily at young people. Joe Camel, harshly (and probably inaccurately)
condemned as seductive to children, has been dropped from R.J. Reynolds's
advertising.

The National Center for Tobacco-Free Kids has raised more than $32 million
since 1996. The proposed tobacco settlement has drawn intense coverage.
Among its requirements: that cigarette companies supply $500 million a year
to pay for anti-smoking education programs, that cigarette vending machines
be banned everywhere, and that all tobacco billboards and promotional
materials and product placement in movies and TV shows be forbidden.

Minors, meanwhile, have been bombarded with anti-smoking messages. The
warning labels on cigarette packs have been made more explicit and
alarming. In states as diverse as Arizona, California, and Massachusetts,
higher cigarette taxes have gone to pay for lavish anti-smoking campaigns.
Many school districts have altered their health curricula to include
graphic lessons on the dangers of tobacco.

In short, American kids have been exposed in recent years to the most
intense anti-smoking campaign in history. The result?

An explosion of teen-age smoking.

Between 1991 and 1997, smoking rates among high school students jumped from
27.5 percent to 36.4 percent -- a jolting one-third  increase. According
to figures just released by the federal Centers for Disease Control, 40
percent of white high school girls say they have smoked a cigarette at
least once in the past 30 days; 20 percent say they smoke frequently.

Black kids are smoking cigarettes at a rate 80 percent greater than they
were seven years ago. Add in cigars and chewing tobacco, and more than half
of all white teen-age boys are users: 51.5 percent report using some form
of tobacco during the past month.

Crunch the data any way you like, the massive anti-teen-smoking crusade has
been a disaster. Countless millions of dollars have been poured into
convincing youngsters not to smoke, yet a larger share of them are smoking
every day. It is hard to imagine a more thoroughgoing failure. So will the
anti-tobacco warriors, humbled by such a defeat, call off their jihad?

Of course not. They will demand even more restrictions, impose even higher
taxes, curse tobacco companies even more loudly. They will insist that the
law go even further to deprive smokers of the right to choose. And all, of
course, for "the kids."

But imposing ever-tougher sanctions isn't going to make kids lose interest
in smoking. The more the government preaches that cigarettes are nasty,
rude, and reckless, the more some teen-agers will want to smoke. What
better way to get restive adolescents to do something than to hector them
constantly not to do it? Smoking is so wicked that adults are demonizing
even a cartoon camel? Wow! Lemme try one.

For more than a century, teens have been told that smoking is bad for them;
for more than a century, some teens have taken up smoking. Just as some
teens have taken up liquor, some have taken up reckless driving, and some
have taken up drugs.

All are illegal. All are, for that very reason, more appealing and "cool."
Short of adopting dictatorial controls, there are limits to what any
government can do to stop teen-agers from experimenting.

We have made it illegal for minors to acquire tobacco; we have made sure
they know that smoking is unhealthy; we have jacked up the price of
cigarettes with state and federal taxes. That much makes sense. Anything
more -- the bans on tobacco-logo T-shirts, the Joe Camel insanity, the
persecution of restaurant owners -- is hysteria. And as the new statistics
suggest, nothing makes tobacco more alluring to adolescents than hysterical
grown-ups admonishing them not to smoke.

Copyright 1998 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.