Smoked out: teen cigarette use is dropping. Why? Credit a combination of advertising restrictions, higher prices, and the "Truth." (National).

• Author: Vilbig, Peter

National

Rodriguez Barnett could easily have been a teen smoker. The 17-year-old high school senior from St. Paul, Minn., comes from a tobacco-using family: His father, brother, and sister are all smokers, and his mother quit only after recent heart problems. When he was younger, big tobacco companies were using kid-friendly mascots such as Joe Camel, a pack of cigarettes was relatively cheap, and youth smoking was on the rise.

But Barnett hates Big Tobacco. Of course, he knows about the obvious health risks--at this point, who doesn't? What sent him over the edge, motivating him to do spoken-word performances for Target Market, a Minnesota anti-tobacco youth campaign, was the deceit.

"My take is I'm being targeted by the tobacco companies," Barnett says, "and I don't like people manipulating my mind."

Barnett has become a warrior in a modern-day battle of David and Goliath. On the Goliath side are U.S. tobacco companies, which spend $8 billion a year to make smoking appear sexy, sophisticated, and mature. On the David side are anti-tobacco groups, many of them involving teens, that can only spend a fraction of that amount, but have effectively used a series of edgy ads--at a time of higher prices for cigarettes and greater restrictions on where smoking is allowed--to help drive a steep drop in teen smoking.

After climbing in the early 1990s, teen smoking rates have fallen by nearly half for 8th-graders, a third for 10th-graders, and more than 20 percent for 12th-graders (see "Student Smoking Drops," page 12).

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But in a sign that Goliath is far from dead, teen smoking rates remain high. Thirty percent of high school seniors are occasional smokers, and 19 percent smoke daily. (About 25 percent of the adult population smokes regularly.)

Tobacco companies insist they don't target teens in their marketing campaigns. But critics say the tobacco industry depends on hooking the ranks of the young, because once they start smoking, the odds are high that they will continue lighting up for years, possibly for life.

"Tobacco companies know teens are where the money is," says Jeff Arnett, an independent scholar at the University of Maryland who has testified in numerous anti-tobacco lawsuits. "They know that if they get them at 14, they'll have them at 24 and 44." The Surgeon General reports that among current smokers, 80 percent started before they were 18.

Recently, the percentage of teens who say smoking is a health hazard has leveled off, in what could be "an early warning sign" that the slowdown in teen smoking is over, according to a University of Michigan study.

PAYING FOR THEIR OWN DECLINE

The anti-tobacco campaign has its roots in the 1998 settlement of a huge...