Preventing Tobacco Use Among Youth and Young Adults: A Report of the Surgeon General

Excerpt

Tobacco use is a global epidemic among young people. As with adults, it poses a serious health threat to youth and young adults in the United States and has significant implications for this nation’s public and economic health in the future. The impact of cigarette smoking and other tobacco use on chronic disease, which accounts for 75% of American spending on health care, is well-documented and undeniable. Although progress has been made since the first Surgeon General’s report on smoking and health in 1964, nearly one in four high school seniors is a current smoker. Most young smokers become adult smokers. One-half of adult smokers die prematurely from tobacco-related diseases. Despite thousands of programs to reduce youth smoking and hundreds of thousands of media stories on the dangers of tobacco use, generation after generation continues to use these deadly products, and family after family continues to suffer the devastating consequences. Yet a robust science base exists on social, biological, and environmental factors that influence young people to use tobacco, the physiology of progression from experimentation to addiction, other health effects of tobacco use, the epidemiology of youth and young adult tobacco use, and evidence-based interventions that have proven effective at reducing both initiation and prevalence of tobacco use among young people. Those are precisely the issues examined in this report, which aims to support the application of this robust science base.