Ads More Likely Than Peers To Influence Teen Smoking
Youths are twice as likely to be influenced to smoke by tobacco advertising as by peer pressure from friends, a new study has found.
And major marketing campaigns - from racy pictures in cigarette packs in the 1890s to the “Joe Camel” cartoon character today - have been linked to increased smoking by teens, according to a companion study.
Anti-smoking groups say the new findings, released Tuesday, should give impetus to a U.S. Food and Drug Administration proposal to curb sales and promotion of tobacco products among the young.
The tobacco industry, which is fighting the FDA proposal, attacked the studies as unpersuasive and politically motivated.
Thomas Lauria, a spokesman for the industry-sponsored Tobacco Institute, said the new research suggests that adolescents can be “hypnotized” by cigarette ads.
“We contend those (ad campaigns) don’t have hypnotizing effects,” Lauria said. He argued that peer pressure remains more significant than advertising in a teen’s decision to smoke.
But John Pierce, a cancer prevention specialist at the University of California, San Diego, and a co-author of both studies, said an analysis of data from a 1993 survey of 3,536 California adolescents, aged 12 to 17, does not support Lauria’s view.
Youths of 12 or 13 are the most susceptible to trying cigarettes, Pierce said at a news briefing on the research. In the survey, 60 percent of non-smokers in that age group were able to name their favorite cigarette ad. Those who showed such receptivity to smoking were much more likely to go on to become smokers, Pierce said.
Once they start smoking, the study found that factors such as peer pressure, poor school performance or the example of family members who smoke may be greater influences than advertising. But it is the early exposure to the ads that sends youngsters “down the slippery slope” to tobacco use, he said.
The California analysis is to appear today in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. The companion study will be published next month in the journal Health Psychology.
The companion study examined several advertising campaigns during the past century. During the 1890s, when a major manufacturer included pictures of bare-bellied women in its cigarette packs, smoking began to surge among adolescent boys, the researchers said. Smoking among teen girls rose when ads in the 1920s encouraged weight-conscious women to “Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet.”
By the 1970s, Pierce said, teens aged 14 to 17 had become the only group still responsive to tobacco marketing because anti-smoking efforts successfully reached adults during the 1960s.
Lauria of the Tobacco Institute challenged the notion that peaks of teen smoking can be linked to any specific ad campaign because the industry has used advertising so pervasively over the years.
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