Surgeon General’s Video Contest: Tobacco – I’m Not Buying It!
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is betting that young people have something powerful to say about smoking.
Teens 13–17 years old and young adults 18–25 years old are invited to develop original videos that feature one or more of these findings from the recent Surgeon General’s report on tobacco use and young people:
- Cigarette smoking by teens and young adults immediately starts a series of health consequences that include addiction, lung problems, asthma, and heart disease.
- Advertising and promotional activities by tobacco companies influence adolescents and young adults to start and continue smoking.
- Use of tobacco products by teens and young adults shows signs of increasing after years of steady decline.
Submit a video by yourself or with a group of friends, and you could win up to $1,000!
Why You Should Submit a Video
Approximately 88 percent of adults who smoke cigarettes daily report that they started smoking before age 18.
Tobacco is the leading cause of preventable and premature death in America, killing more than 1,200 people every day. For every tobacco-related death, two new young people become regular smokers.
To keep their companies in business, tobacco manufacturers need new people to pick up the habit. This contest is an opportunity to tell them and others why YOU won’t be one of them!
Contest Rules
The deadline for submitting a video is April 20, 2012. Individuals or groups can submit videos in English or Spanish.
All submissions must be made through Challenge.gov. Go there to learn more and submit your video for the tobacco contest.
Grand prize winners in each of four categories will receive $1,000. Three runners-up in each category will receive $500.
Find inspiration for your video by checking out these resources:
- Preventing Tobacco Use Among Youth and Young Adults: A Report of the Surgeon General
- Past SBB blog posts on smoking and tobacco
- Facts on tobacco and nicotine addiction from NIDA for Teens
- Facts on tobacco and kids from the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids
- Tips on quitting from former smokers
Mini Cigars: The Facts Behind the Flavors
When you hear that something comes in strawberry, ice cream, chocolate, peach, or grape flavors, your first thoughts may be: ice cream, candy, or something made for kids. After all, manufacturers of kids’ toothpastes, medicines, and vitamins add fun flavors to make their products more appealing. You may also think that flavored products are harmless, like candy.
But if you think flavored mini cigars are harmless, you’re mistaken.
Cigars of any kind, including flavored mini cigars, contain the same addictive and cancer-causing qualities as regular cigarettes. In fact, cigar tobacco has a high concentration of nitrogen compounds, some of the strongest cancer-causing substances known. Cigar smoking also is linked to gum disease and tooth loss.
Although the Food and Drug Administration has banned similar flavored cigarettes, there’s no such ban (yet) on mini cigars.
Unfortunately, more and more teens across the country are smoking mini cigars. In some states, like Maryland, statistics show that 14% of teens smoke cigars—this mirrors the rate of cigarette smoking among teens.
But Maryland isn’t ignoring the issue. Recently, the state launched a new campaign called The Cigar Trap to let teens discover the truth about these flavored brown sticks that you might see behind the checkout counter, near the candy bars and gum.
Find out more about mini cigars, including how you can tell your friends the facts behind the flavors.
No More Smoking: A “Quit” Coach Is Just a Text Message Away
For anyone who resolves to stop smoking, help is as close as your cell phone.
According to NIDA’s 2011 Monitoring the Future survey results, teen smoking rates are currently at their lowest since the survey began in 1975. However, many teens continue to take up the habit—19 percent of 12th-graders reported past-month cigarette use.
By now, we all know that smoking has negative health effects. These include lung and heart disease and particularly cancer—since cigarettes contain chemicals that are carcinogenic, or cancer-causing. However, when it comes to quitting, the main problem is nicotine. Nicotine is addictive and makes quitting notoriously hard.
To help teens quit, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) recently launched SmokefreeTXT, a free text-to-quit service that sends text messages with encouragement, advice, and tips directly to teens’ cell phones.
How It Works
Sign up at www.teen.smokefree.gov or text “QUIT” to “iQUIT” (47848) and provide the date you smoked last. After that, you’ll receive text messages for up to 6 weeks. Research shows that support for quitting continues to be important beyond the first few weeks.
Smokefree Teen
The text-to-quit campaign is just one feature of a broader effort to encourage teens to quit smoking. NCI’s new Smokefree Teen Web site features information, quizzes, comics, and other resources to help teens understand the decisions they make and to take control of their health.
Smokefree Teen also offers a free smartphone app, QuitSTART—an interactive guide that provides mood management tips, tracks cravings, and monitors quit attempts.
You can find Smokefree Teen on several social media pages to connect other teens with tools to help them quit. Think about “liking” Smokefree Teen on Facebook, even if you don’t smoke, to show support for your friends or family who are trying to quit.
Is 2012 the year of texting for healthy living? Let us know if you think campaigns like these can help you stay committed to your resolutions.
Smoking: How It Primes the Brain for Addiction
More people understand now the harmful effects that smoking has on the body as well as the addictive effects of nicotine. The good news is that teens seem to be getting the message—SBB recently reported that smoking rates among 8th-, 10th-, and 12th-graders are at an all-time low.
But many teens are still smoking—according to the 2011 Monitoring the Future Study, 19 percent of high school seniors reported smoking in the past month.
New NIDA research gives yet another reason for teens to avoid lighting that first cigarette—nicotine may “prime” the brain to enhance cocaine’s effects, making it a very dangerous “gateway drug.” That means it could open the door to other drug use.
Science Suggests that Nicotine Changes the Brain
Evidence shows that most people who tried drugs like cocaine were first tobacco or alcohol users. This concept of “gateway drugs” has been controversial, mostly because people question whether prior use of drugs like nicotine, alcohol, or marijuana actually leads to later drug use. Before now, studies have not been able to show a biological reason why smoking or other nicotine use could increase a person’s chances of using illegal street drugs.
That changed when NIDA researchers found that mice exposed to nicotine in their drinking water for at least 7 days showed an increased response to cocaine.
Why did this happen? Researchers recognized that nicotine actually changes the structure of your DNA, it reprograms how certain genes are expressed—in particular a gene that has been related to addiction—and ultimately, it enhances the response to cocaine.
Moving on from mice, researchers looked at statistics in humans—in particular at when people began nicotine use and their degree of cocaine dependence: Among cocaine users who smoked cigarettes before starting cocaine, the rate of cocaine dependence was higher compared with those who tried cocaine first (before smoking cigarettes).
The study doesn’t mean that every person who smokes cigarettes will eventually become addicted to cocaine. But it does suggest that if a person who smokes cigarettes tries cocaine, their brains may have been changed by nicotine to make it more likely that they will become addicted to cocaine.
Need help quitting smoking? Take a look at these resources from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Does Smoking on TV Influence You?
The Government banned cigarette commercials on television in 1970 after the 1964 Surgeon General’s report found that smoking cigarettes increased your chances of getting lung cancer. This was a big deal, considering the strong smoking culture in the United States at the time. However, this ban didn’t stop smoking on television. Forty-years later, characters on television shows continue to smoke.
And, what if we told you that teens are one of the primary audiences for some of those shows?
Researchers from Columbia University and Legacy (formerly the American Legacy Foundation), an anti-tobacco group that produces the “Truth” anti-smoking ad campaign, teamed up to find out how often tobacco use shows up on TV shows popular with teens. The shows included:
“Gossip Girl,” “Heroes,” “American Dad,” “Desperate Housewives,” “Family Guy,” “House,” and “The Simpsons.” They also looked at reality shows like “America’s Next Top Model” to measure depictions such as smoking, or even showing a pipe or pack of cigarettes on screen.
TV Shows Still Smokin’
Researchers watched every episode of the season. Of the 73 episodes in the analysis, 40 percent contained at least one depiction of tobacco (mainly cigarettes), double the rate from a similar study 10 years earlier. In all, there were 271 depictions, which worked out to an average of 4.4 depictions an hour.
Published in February 2011, the researchers concluded in their study:
Substantial tobacco use was observed in television shows popular among youth. It is projected that almost 1 million youth were exposed to tobacco depictions through the programming examined. Tobacco use on television should be a cause for concern, particularly because of the high volume of television viewing among younger audiences.
Other research on the connection between hours spent watching TV and young people taking up smoking, it was found that tweens and teens who watched 5 or more hours of TV each day were almost six times more likely to take up smoking than those who watched less than 2 hours.
Why Does It Matter?
Seeing other teens and young adults—celebrities, entertainers, and musicians—smoking can make it seem “cool” or popular. In fact, tobacco companies are counting on it and have invested a lot of time and money to find out the best places to reach teens. Just because the tobacco companies are banned from showing commercials on television doesn’t mean they can’t influence the content of TV shows in other, more subtle ways, or use other tools to influence smoking behavior.
Fortunately, NIDA’s latest Monitoring the Future survey of 8th, 10th and 12th graders found that smoking is decreasing to historically low rates among teens, so it appears most young people are smarter than the tobacco marketers had hoped.
Which Program Had the Most Smoking-Related Depictions?
Meanwhile, can you guess which primetime program that the Columbia University and Legacy researchers studied showed the highest incidence of smoking-related depictions? Was it (a) “Gossip Girl,” (b) “Heroes,” or (c) “America’s Next Top Model”? If you picked (c), the reality-based show “America’s Top Model,” you got it right.
Kind of ironic that a show about being beautiful and glamorous shows young girls using an addictive product that eventually will make their teeth yellow, cause premature wrinkling, and possibly lead to cancer, emphysema, or heart disease—none of which is very glamorous!
What do you think about depictions of smoking on TV? To answer the question, you can either write your response in the “Leave a Reply” box below or send us a message. As always, we read all comments and consider all feedback! We look forward to hearing from you.
To learn more about the effect of product placement on teens, check out Drugs: Shatter the Myths.
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National Institute on Drug Abuse | National Institutes of Health | U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
