EYES WIDE SHUT.

AuthorBRENNA, SUSAN
PositionMore teenagers smoke - Brief Article

DESPITE ALL THE STUDIES, AND DESPITE ALL THE EDUCATION, TEENS ARE STILL SMOKING IN RECORD NUMBERS.

On warm nights, when there's no school the next day, the Starbucks patio at a strip shopping center in suburban Atlanta resembles a teenage smokers' convention.

Every table is crowded with groups of friends passing packs of Newports and Marlboros and lingering late over iced lattes.

One recent night, Adam Protos, 18, and three of his friends were debating which warnings, of all those they'd received in a lifetime of antismoking ads and health-class warning films, came closest to killing their cigarette habits.

There was the death last year from smoking-related cancer of a classmate's mother; that was frightening. Adam also recalled how, in his freshman year, a man with throat cancer came to his suburban high school and delivered an antismoking plea through his artificial voice box.

"That kind of told me, this can happen to you, but did it really make me stop smoking?" Adam says. "Does seeing fat people make you stop eating? You've got to do what makes you happy, and smoking makes me happy."

Adam and his friends belong to a generation of teens who have received more education about the hazards of tobacco than any generation in history. As kindergartners, alarmed by the dangers of smoking, they flushed their mothers' menthols. They have been shown the tricks cigarette makers used to seduce children, such as free gear and billboards with cartoon images (now illegal). They have seen the anticigarette ads that use humor and mockery to deglamorize smoking. And they've seen stomach-turning photos of smokers' blackened lungs and ulcerated tongues.

Yet today, the percentage of high school seniors who smoke is close to a 19-year high. Every year throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the number of teens who smoke has increased. By 1997, almost 37 percent of high school students reported that they had smoked during the past month, according to a national study. The number declined slightly last year, but still, well over a third of American students smoke by the time they leave high school.

What's wrong with this picture?

Each of the two dozen high-school-aged smokers interviewed for this article had a different reason for ignoring the dangers he or she knows so well. Some say they smoke to relieve stress from school. Others say it gives them something to do at parties. Some say they get an intensified sensation from mixing tobacco and alcohol. Some say they've...

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