ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, May 24, 1996 TAG: 9605240077
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
NOTE: Above
Teen-age smoking is climbing rapidly, particularly among young black males, according to a survey of more than 10,000 high school students released Thursday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In 1995, the CDC found, nearly 35 percent of all high school students reported smoking during the month before the survey, a figure that jumped from 27.5 percent in 1991. During those four years, smoking rates among black teen-age males nearly doubled, from 14 percent to almost 28 percent.
The trend among blacks is particularly troubling to health experts, who say it reverses a sharp decline in smoking among black youths. The only encouraging news in the survey was that smoking remained inexplicably low among black girls, 12.2 percent of whom reported using cigarettes in the month before the survey.
``The problem of teen smoking is even worse than we previously believed,'' said Michael Eriksen, director of the CDC's Office on Smoking and Health. ``Smoking rates are increasing rapidly for all teen-agers, except for black teen-age girls, and what we previously thought was a success story - low rates among black high school students - is now beginning to deteriorate.''
The study, which appears in this week's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, also found it is easy for young people to buy cigarettes, even though doing so is illegal.
More than three out of four high school students who had purchased cigarettes were not asked to show proof of age. Fifty-seven percent of those surveyed bought their cigarettes from a store, a vending machine, or by giving someone else money to buy them.
President Clinton has proposed regulating nicotine as a drug and imposing tough restrictions on cigarette advertising. In a statement issued Thursday, Clinton called the report ``disturbing proof that more and more young teen-agers are becoming lifelong smokers and too little is being done to prevent illegal tobacco sales to them.''
The tobacco companies are fighting Clinton's plan in court. Last week, the nation's largest cigarette manufacturer, Philip Morris, put forth a less stringent proposal for a federal law that would enact some advertising controls in exchange for the Food and Drug Administration dropping its plans to declare nicotine a drug.
Public health advocates and tobacco foes who strongly oppose the Philip Morris plan seized on the CDC's findings Thursday, saying the study provided proof that tobacco advertising lures young people to smoke and that the Clinton plan is the only one that will keep cigarettes out of the hands of kids.
LENGTH: Medium: 55 linesby CNB