Drug Education News

The Guardian has access to new research that the Roy Castle Foundation will be publishing in the near future.  It looks at how and why young people start smoking, making the case that knowledge about the health risks alone is not enough to prevent young people from starting:

“By the end of primary school, children are fantastically aware of the risks of smoking and what it does to their health. They talk about cancer and heart disease quite confidently. It doesn’t stop them starting it, though. So it’s possible they see it as classic risk-taking behaviour,” says Woods.

Dr Lisa McNally, a health psychologist specialising in teen smoking, says that adults need to face up to the fact that focusing on prevention alone isn’t enough. “Kids get addicted to nicotine very quickly. We need to address the addictiveness of cigarettes. As a society we are quite uncomfortable with the idea of children being addicts.”

The piece quotes the statistics about the number of young people who regularly smoke (9%) from the Information Centre’s Smoking, Drinking and Drug Use Amongst Young People in England in 2006,  but miss out the finding that two in five regular smokers (43%) said they would like to give up.

Nevertheless, those they have interviewed make a number of suggestions on how we might affect the numbers starting and the numbers trying to give up.  They point to an online game from the Roy Castle Foundation, and go on to say:

Another technique is counter-marketing - turning the idea that a smoker is someone who is independent and rebellious into one who is in reality a puppet of big business and the government.

“Smoking for young lads is often a symbol of masculinity and toughness,” says McNally, “but you just need to show them the robust evidence linking smoking to impotence. You can literally see their image of smoking change before your very eyes.”

There are also tips for talking to your child about smoking.