YOUTH SMOKING ON THE UPSWING

Forty percent of high school students use tobacco. Despite anti-smoking
campaigns,the numbers continue to rise.

Two out of every five high school students in the United States regularly
use some kind of tobacco, and the percentage of teens who smoke is still
increasing despite efforts to discourage them,the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention said Thursday.

Cigarette use by high school students has risen one-third over just six
years, the agency said. And though whites remain the heaviest users,
smoking had almost doubled among black students, a particularly troubling
finding given black teens' longtime resistance to smoking's heavily
advertised allure.

"These numbers are alarming and surprising - and depressing," said Dr.
Michael Eriksen, director of CDC's Office on Smoking and Health. "We had
hoped that we would start to see a turnaround, and we haven't yet."

The Clinton administration has mounted strong but unsuccessful efforts to
stifle teen smoking. The statistics were released Thursday to coincide with
Kick Butts Day, a national observance for which administration members led
by Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala made appearance
across the country.

The numbers come from the 1997 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, a national
survey of 16,000 teens taken every two years. In 1991, the agency said,
27.5 percent of all high school students and 12.6 percent of black students
smoked. In 1997, the most recent survey, the number for all students rose
to 36.4 percents, and the proportion of blacks who smoked rose to 22.7
percent.

Those rates mean that roughly 5.5 million of the 15 million high school-age
teens in the United States are smokers, according to CDC. That is a higher
rate of smoking than among adults; roughly 25 percent of U.S. adults smoke,
a percentage that has held steady for several years.

In the 1997 survey, the agency measured teens' use of all tobacco products
on the market: cigarettes, smokeless chewing tobacco and, for the first
time, cigars. The results were striking: 42.7 percent of high schoolers had
used some form of tobacco at least once in the previous 30 days. Among
white teen boys, the rate was 51.5 percent.

"Tobacco causes cancer whether you smoke it in cigarettes or cigars or chew
it in your mouth," Eriksen said. "To think that over half of the white boys
in high school are using tobacco is a disgrace; it's a failure for adults
and for our society."

The survey also found:

The rate at which black teens smoke rose the fastest, but it is increasing
for every group: a 28 percent increase for whites, 43 percent for Hispanics
and 80 percent for blacks over the six years. Overall, almost 47 percent of
white teens, almost 37 percent of Hispanic teens and more than 29 percent
of black teens now use tobacco in some form.

Girls smoked more than boys during the 1980s, but both genders now smoke to
almost the same degree - though boys are 10 times more likely than girls to
use smokeless tobacco.

More than one out of every five students smokes cigars regularly.