Smoking: Habit That Dies Hard Studies Show Age Makes Difference In Length Of Addiction

The later a teenager starts smoking, the sooner he or she is likely to quit - but even late beginners probably will puff away for at least 16 years, new reports say.

“Cigarettes are an addiction that (teenagers) will not easily escape,” John Pierce of the University of California, San Diego, concluded in the American Journal of Public Health.

The government says some 3 million teenagers smoke and a third will eventually die from a smoking-related illness.

Government surveys show many teen smokers claim they won’t still be using cigarettes five years later. When they kick the habit is important, because a British study found that people who give up smoking by age 30 don’t have a statistically significant increased risk of dying from it - but that risk then jumps every year smoking continues, said Elizabeth Gilpin, Pierce’s co-author.

Gilpin and Pierce pulled government research from 1965 through 1988 to track how smoking practices have changed among different generations. They extrapolated that data to people ages 17-21 who regularly smoke today, picking that age group because young teens typically don’t smoke as regularly.

Half of this generation of male smokers won’t kick the habit before they turn 33, and half of the females won’t quit before they turn 37, concluded the study in the journal.

A separate study found young teen smokers have worse odds of quitting by age 30 than older teens.

Naomi Breslau of the Henry Ford Health Sciences Center in Detroit randomly picked from a health maintenance organization 414 people in their 20s who had ever smoked. Of them, 145 had quit smoking for at least a year.

Just 4.4 percent of the people who started smoking before they turned 14 had kicked the habit. But people who started smoking later in their adolescence did better: 9.6 percent of smokers who started at ages 14-16 and 13.6 percent of those who started after age 16 had quit.

Education was the only other strong predictor of who would quit smoking. Breslau found that smokers who finished college were 2.5 times more likely than high school graduates to quit.

The tobacco industry says it opposes teenage smoking, and sponsors a program called “It’s the Law” to inform store clerks it is illegal in every state to sell tobacco to anyone under 18. The program gives participating merchants window stickers to alert customers to the laws as well.

But a third study in the journal concluded “It’s the Law” participants sold to minors just as often as their competitors.

University of Massachusetts researchers found 12 teens, ages 12 through 17, who made 240 attempts to buy cigarettes from store clerks. Half of the stores were “It’s the Law” participants.

They said 28 percent of the stores consistently obeyed the law - and there was no statistical difference between “It’s the Law” participants and other stores, reported study author Dr. Joseph DiFranza. The most youthful-appearing 12-year-old bought cigarettes one out of every five tries, DiFranza said.

The Massachusetts study came just as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that teenagers nationwide were finding it easier to buy cigarettes. A new CDC survey found that 62 percent of teen smokers bought their own cigarettes in 1993, up from 58 percent in 1989.

DiFranza’s study doesn’t mean industry-sponsored store education can’t work, said Thomas Lauria of the Tobacco Institute, which this year expanded the program to get more store owners to train their clerks personally.

“‘It’s the Law’ was a good start and now the energies are being put toward a broader retail awareness program nationwide,” Lauria said.

The federal government has given states until Sept. 1 to figure out how to catch stores that sell to minors and stop them, or risk losing health grants.