Article #1:
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Teen smokers realize too late they're hooked: study
Last Updated: Thursday, July 17, 2008 | 9:30 AM ET
Toronto teen Latreice Keen started "borrowing" cigarettes from her mother when she was 11 years old. Her friend Jessica Vaughan used to light up in a park near home, delighting in the "high" it gave her at age 12.
Vaughan has occasionally wanted to quit — "sometimes the cigarette tastes nasty" — and Keen knocked off the habit for two years when she was 14. But now, at 18 and 17 years old respectively, they're both daily smokers.
"Now, it's a natural thing to smoke," Vaughan said.
"Before (quitting) was easier; now it's harder," added Keen, who said she wants to give it up again.
Teen smokers often try to quit and seriously believe they can, only realizing they're hooked when it's too late, according to a new study by Université de Montreal researchers.
The study charted the course of nicotine addiction in teens over five years, establishing several common milestones. Adolescents make their first serious attempt to nix the habit after only 2½ months, yet frequently keep puffing anyway. It's usually not until nearly two years passes that their addiction dawns on them, and by that point their confidence to quit is shattered.
"Kids are experiencing symptoms of dependence with really low exposures to cigarettes, and beginning to experience this difficulty of quitting very, very early on," said Jennifer O'Loughlin, lead author of the study published online Wednesday in the American Journal of Public Health. "For kids, there's no window of opportunity that you can kind of experiment with cigarettes and get away with it."
The physiological impact smoking has on the body and brain is likely the strongest reason these early smokers can't abandon the butt, suggests O'Loughlin, who works in the university's social and preventative medicine department.
"Some kids are actually escalating the cigarette use to quite an extent at the same time as expressing wanting to quit," she said. "It seems like a paradox."
The study — funded by the Canadian Cancer Society — followed 319 students ages 12 or 13 who had never smoked, but picked it up during the five years of the research. Every three months, the group answered a questionnaire about their habits.
More than 70 per cent expressed a desire to quit, but only 19 per cent managed to go smoke free for 12 months or more. Girls and boys were equally unsuccessful in their quitting attempts, although girls were more likely to want to try to stop.
"Everyone has thought that these people don't want to quit, they have no motivation to quit," said Tony George, chair of the addictions research section at Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. "What it says is that we have an in with them."
Teens go through stages of smoking
Several stages emerged consistently as teens took up smoking. Only a couple of months after their first drag, teens declared in the questionnaire that they'd stopped forever. Yet nine months later, they were smoking monthly; 19 months in and they were smoking weekly.
The study found that daily smoking became the norm around the two-year point, when cravings and withdrawal symptoms are common.
Two further years and teens were staggering under the albatross of full-blown tobacco dependence.
"Kids really don't understand how quickly they can get addicted to nicotine and to smoking," said Roberta Ferrence, executive director of the Ontario Tobacco Research Unit.
Finances and health are possible reasons youth want to cease smoking, Ferrence said. However, she believes that individual-targeted quitting programs, based on building willpower in youth, just don't cut it.
"You can't tell 12-year-olds 'just say no.' It's just not a productive way of doing things," she said. "What you want to do is delay the onset of smoking to a point where kids are less likely till they're adults."
In the questionnaire, teens gave several reasons for not giving up smoking, including "everybody around me smokes," "I have too much stress in my life," "my cravings are too strong," and "I don't need to because I smoke so little now."
In Ferrence's view, policy-makers must boost taxes and control smuggling and contraband products, while parents should refuse allowances and ban their children from lighting up at home.
Article #2:
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Menthol manipulated to hook young smokers, researchers say
Last Updated: Thursday, July 17, 2008 | 8:45 AM ET
Tobacco companies deliberately changed the menthol levels in cigarettes depending upon whom they were marketing them to — lower levels for young smokers who preferred the milder brands and higher levels to "lock in lifelong adult smokers," researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health concluded.
The researchers reviewed industry documents dating back decades on product development and on strategic plans for menthol products.
They said that the tobacco companies researched how controlling menthol levels could increase sales among specific groups. Milder brands with lower menthol levels appealed to younger smokers. The milder products were then marketed to young consumers.
One document from R.J. Reynolds noted that all three major menthol brands "built their franchise with YAS (younger adult smokers) … using a low-menthol product strategy. However, as smokers acclimate to menthol, their demand for menthol increases over time."
In 1987, R.J. Reynolds marketed low-level menthol varieties to persuade consumers to switch from regular brands and to recruit new, young smokers, noting: "First-time smoker reaction is generally negative.… Initial negatives can be alleviated with a low level of menthol."
Philip-Morris USA used a two-prong strategy to increase Marlboro's share in the menthol market by targeting young adults and older smokers, the researchers concluded. Marlboro Milds were introduced nationally in 2000 and became popular among young smokers.
The entry of that product coincided with an increase in the menthol level of the regular Marlboro Menthol brand intended for older smokers. The milds were responsible for almost 80 per cent of the company's menthol-category growth that year.
"For decades, the tobacco industry has carefully manipulated menthol content not only to lure youth but also to lock in lifelong adult customers," said Howard Koh, a co-author of the paper.
Targeting denied by tobacco giant
William Phelps, a spokesman for Philip Morris USA, the largest tobacco company in the U.S., said the study's conclusions were not supported by the facts cited. He said the study includes excerpts from several marketing documents. None talked about targeting youth or adolescents.
"At our company, our marketing goal is to find ways to effectively and responsibly connect brands with adults who smoke," Phelps said. "Those brands are designed to meet the diverse preferences of adults who smoke. What we disagree with are the authors' conclusion that menthol levels were manipulated to gain market share among adolescents."
R.J. Reynolds said it agrees that individuals select their preferred menthol levels to create desired sensory effects while smoking, and that there is a broad range of menthol levels among popular brands. But the company said all of its products are made for and marketed to adults.
"The bottom line is minors should never use tobacco products and adults who do not use or have quit using tobacco products should not start. That is a guiding principle of the company," the company said in a statement.
"It would appear this report is simply an effort to push support for federal regulation of the tobacco industry, not a scientific review of the menthol category."
Gregory Connolly, one of the report's co-authors, said the tobacco industry was careful not to talk about adolescents in the documents he reviewed, mostly from the '80s and '90s.
"They talk about young smokers. For me, that's just a euphemism for going after adolescent, first-time smokers," Connolly said.
Nice, eh? Stupid teenagers and evil tobacco company executives, just like the stereotype. No doubt the makers of
South Park will explain that I'm just a left-wing big-city liberal elitist who's full of shit, and these researchers are stupid.
Your head is humming and it won't go, in case you don't know, the piper's calling you to join him
Or it could be that for a long time the "cultural image" of an "australian" and still is for bogans (derogatory term for lower class peoples), was a blue collar tough bloke with a ciggy and a wide brim hat. Look up the movie "Kenny", there ya go 
.