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Can Teenagers quit smoking?

Published on July 10, 2008 9:53 AM

The buying tobacco by teenagers rose. Mark Stuart, head of research at The Chartered Institute of Marketing said that even smoking bans can’t stop teenagers to quit.

Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), showed that while more and more adults are quitting the habit, about 450 children start smoking every day in the UK. According to a study, 82% of teenagers start smoking before the age of 18 and 39% of teenager fewer than 16 smoking regularly even though they are well informed of the risks of smoking.

The smoking bans will not help teenager to quit. They will always find a way around adults only to smoke, they will ask adults to buy their cigarettes for them or take them from older friends and family members. In this case the adult smokers must try to stop young smokers as earlier as possible. Adults have to give the right message about smoking to teenagers at the right time. The major problem is that young people often don’t want to give up.

Claire, a 16-year-old student from Cardiff, said “It won’t make any difference; plenty of smaller newsagents will still sell cigarettes to us, as they do with alcohol. There is so much underage drinking in Wales and the rest of Britain, so how will this be any different? Plus, it’s the person’s decision, if they want to smoke, they’ll smoke.”

Most of teenagers didn’t think they can die at such a young age, even though adult campaigns showed them images of smokers’ lungs.

Adults must communicate with teenagers, to give them effective messages in order to quit smoking among them. Communication has got to be on young people terms and in language they relate to because teenagers only choose what they want to hear.

Adults have to point out the positive benefits of not smelling of smoke, having clear skin and white teeth, and all this benefits will attract their next girlfriend or boyfriend. Or to take another example, for teenagers who like sport, whether it’s rugby, football or hockey emphasizes the benefits of healthier lungs to increase performance.

The Roy Castle Foundation launched an innovative online game. They upload also a picture of a smoker for to show the ageing effects of smoking on the skin, teeth and eyes. After seeing the picture teenagers started to make jokes they didn’t understand that this is a hard hitting message.

Preventing our next generation from millions of tobacco-related deaths is an easy task and unfortunately there isn’t one solution for all.