This booklet for schools, medical personnel, and parents contains highlights from the 2012 Surgeon General's report on tobacco use among youth and teens (ages 12 through 17) and young adults (ages 18 through 25). The report details the causes and the consequences of tobacco use among youth and young adults by focusing on the social, environmental, advertising, and marketing influences that encourage youth and young adults to initiate and sustain tobacco use. This is the first time tobacco data on young adults as a discrete population have been explored in detail. The report also highlights successful strategies to prevent young people from using tobacco.
"The continued success in global tobacco control is detailed in this year’s WHO Report on the Global Tobacco Epidemic, 2013. The fourth in the series, this year’s report presents the status of the MPOWER measures, with country-specific data updated and aggregated through 2012. In addition, the report provides a special focus on legislation to ban tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship (TAPS) in WHO Member States and an in-depth analyses of TAPS bans were performed, allowing for a more detailed understanding of progress and future challenges in this area."--Website summary.
Tobacco use by adolescents and young adults poses serious concerns. Nearly all adults who have ever smoked daily first tried a cigarette before 26 years of age. Current cigarette use among adults is highest among persons aged 21 to 25 years. The parts of the brain most responsible for cognitive and psychosocial maturity continue to develop and change through young adulthood, and adolescent brains are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of nicotine. At the request of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Public Health Implications of Raising the Minimum Age of Legal Access to Tobacco Products considers the likely public health impact of raising the minimum age for purchasing tobacco products. The report reviews the existing literature on tobacco use patterns, developmental biology and psychology, health effects of tobacco use, and the current landscape regarding youth access laws, including minimum age laws and their enforcement. Based on this literature, the report makes conclusions about the likely effect of raising the minimum age to 19, 21, and 25 years on tobacco use initiation. The report also quantifies the accompanying public health outcomes based on findings from two tobacco use simulation models. According to the report, raising the minimum age of legal access to tobacco products, particularly to ages 21 and 25, will lead to substantial reductions in tobacco use, improve the health of Americans across the lifespan, and save lives. Public Health Implications of Raising the Minimum Age of Legal Access to Tobacco Products will be a valuable reference for federal policy makers and state and local health departments and legislators.
The health and economic costs of tobacco use in military and veteran populations are high. In 2007, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Department of Defense (DoD) requested that the Institute of Medicine (IOM) make recommendations on how to reduce tobacco initiation and encourage cessation in both military and veteran populations. In its 2009 report, Combating Tobacco in Military and Veteran Populations, the authoring committee concludes that to prevent tobacco initiation and encourage cessation, both DoD and VA should implement comprehensive tobacco-control programs.
The National Institutes of Health Publication 07-6242, The Role of the Media in Promoting and Reducing Tobacco Use, NCI Tobacco Control Monograph 19, (the 19th of the Tobacco Control Monograph series of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) provides a critical, scientific review and synthesis of current evidence regarding the power of the media both to encourage and discourage tobacco use. The work presented is the most current and comprehensive distillation of the scientific literature on media communications in tobacco promotion and tobacco control. The six main parts of this monograph deal with aspects of media communications relevant to tobacco promotion and tobacco control. Part 1, an overview, frames the rationale for the monograph's organization and presents the key issues and conclusions of the research as a whole and of the individual chapters. This section describes media research theories that guided this assessment of the relationship between media and tobacco use, which can be viewed as a multilevel issue ranging from consumer-level advertising and promotion to stakeholder-level marketing aimed toward retailers, policymakers, and others. Part 2 further explores tobacco marketing—the range of media interventions used by the tobacco industry to promote its products, such as brand advertising and promotion, as well as corporate sponsorship and advertising. This section also evaluates the evidence for the influence of tobacco marketing on smoking behavior and discusses regulatory and constitutional issues related to marketing restrictions. Part 3 explores how both the tobacco control community and the tobacco industry have used news and entertainment media to advocate their positions and how such coverage relates to tobacco use and tobacco policy change. The section also appraises evidence of the influence of tobacco use in movies on youth smoking initiation. Part 4 focuses on tobacco control media interventions and the strategies, themes, and communication designs intended to prevent tobacco use or encourage cessation, including opportunities for new media interventions. This section also synthesizes evidence on the effectiveness of mass media campaigns in reducing smoking. Part 5 discusses tobacco industry efforts to diminish media interventions by the tobacco control community and to use the media to oppose state tobacco control ballot initiatives and referenda. Finally, Part 6 examines possible future directions in the use of media to promote or to control tobacco use and summarizes research needs and opportunities. Key lessons from this volume can inform policymakers as well as scientists and practitioners. Most critical from a policy standpoint is the conclusion, supported by strong evidence, that both exposure to tobacco marketing and depictions of tobacco in movies promote smoking initiation. In the United States in 2005—the same year in which 2.7 million American adolescents aged 12 to 17 used cigarettes in the past month1 and 438,000 Americans died prematurely from diseases caused by tobacco use or secondhand smoke exposure2—the tobacco industry spent $13.5 billion (in 2006 dollars) on cigarette advertising and promotion,3 an average of $37 million per day. The tobacco industry continues to succeed in overcoming partial restrictions on tobacco marketing in the United States, and tobacco marketing remains pervasive and effective in promoting tobacco use. Efforts to curb the depiction of tobacco use in movies have increased in recent years, and the evidence reviewed here indicates that progress in this area could be expected to translate into lower rates of youth smoking initiation in the future. Strong evidence indicates that media campaigns can reduce tobacco use. This volume highlights the complexities of assessing the media's influence on tobacco-related attitudes and behavior. A vast range of research is reviewed.~
Tobacco use among youth and young adults in any form, including e-cigarettes, is not safe. In recent years, e-cigarette use by youth and young adults has increased at an alarming rate. E-cigarettes are now the most commonly used tobacco product among youth in the United States. This timely report highlights the rapidly changing patterns of e-cigarette use among youth and young adults, assesses what we know about the health effects of using these products, and describes strategies that tobacco companies use to recruit our nation's youth and young adults to try and continue using e-cigarettes. The report also outlines interventions that can be adopted to minimize the harm these products cause to our nation's youth.E-cigarettes are tobacco products that deliver nicotine. Nicotine is a highly addictive substance, and many of today's youth who are using e-cigarettes could become tomorrow's cigarette smokers. Nicotine exposure can also harm brain development in ways that may affect the health and mental health of our kids.E-cigarette use among youth and young adults is associated with the use of other tobacco products, including conventional cigarettes. Because most tobacco use is established during adolescence, actions to prevent our nation's young people from the potential of a lifetime of nicotine addiction are critical.E-cigarette companies appear to be using many of the advertising tactics the tobacco industry used to persuade a new generation of young people to use their products. Companies are promoting their products through television and radio advertisements that use celebrities, sexual content, and claims of independence to glamorize these addictive products and make them appealing to young people.
In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.
