Smoking Rates

Orange County adults are less likely to light up than those in any of the other 98 metropolitan areas surveyed in a new federal report on smoking released Thursday. The study, the first of its kind to measure smoking patterns in specific urban areas, found that 13% of Orange County adults smoke cigarettes, compared with a national average of about 23%.

President Clinton's call Wednesday to raise cigarette prices by as much as $1.50 a pack to dissuade kids from lighting up brought nods of approval from public health leaders in Orange County. But the teen smokers' take on the plan was a unanimous sneer. Youths will cheat, steal, starve and mooch off rich friends before they give up the habit, a group of Los Alamitos High School students said.

In the first major change to cigarette packaging in a quarter-century, the Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday it would require graphic warning labels that cover half a package's front and rear and the top 20% of all cigarette ads. The labels will feature either drawings or photos illustrating graphically the dangers associated with smoking and will be accompanied by text stating that smoking is addictive or that it kills. The pictures feature such things as a diseased lung, a corpse and a man smoking a cigarette through a tracheotomy tube.

The cigarette smoking rate in the United States has reached the lowest level ever reported, with less than 27% of adult Americans lighting up in 1986, federal health researchers said today. That is down nearly 4 percentage points from a 1985 survey and down nearly 14 points in two decades. The first Adult Use of Tobacco Survey, taken by the national Centers for Disease Control740323701Americans late last year. It found that 26.5% of them smoked--29.5% of the men and 23.8% of the women.

Squeezed between the Doritos and Budweiser ads during last weekend's Super Bowl was a spot paid for with California tax dollars. Airtime for the most expensive television event of the year is probably not the first item on which deficit-plagued California might be expected to spend money. The ad, exhorting people to quit smoking, came as Gov. Jerry Brown had proposed gutting many state healthcare services to help balance the budget. The commercial was a part of a $14.5-million television campaign funded this year partly by a 25-cent-per-pack tax on cigarettes.

While the lion's share of youth anti-smoking efforts has focused on cigarettes, a new report in the CDC journal Preventing Chronic Disease suggests more needs to be done to reduce the number of teens smoking flavored tobacco from hookahs. According to a recent survey cited in the report, 18.5% of 12th-grade students admitted to using a hookah in the previous year. And what's particularly concerning to the study authors, led by Daniel Morris of the Oregon Health Authority's public health division, is that many young people don't seem to recognize that hookah use carries serious health risks: Hookah smoke contains many of the same toxins as cigarettes and has been associated with a similar laundry list of diseases such as lung cancer and respiratory illness.

Californians are kicking the habit. The rate of adult smoking has dropped sharply over the last two decades, reaching its lowest level on record, thanks largely to aggressive tobacco control campaigns by state and local governments, officials said. Last year, 11.9% of Californians said they smoked, down from 25.9% in 1984, the earliest data available, according to the California Department of Public Health. Only one other state, Utah, had a lower smoking rate, 9.1%, last year.

After 40 years of continual declines, the smoking rate in the United States has stabilized for the last five years, with one in every five Americans still lighting up regularly, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday. Moreover, more than half of all children are exposed to toxic, secondhand smoke and 98% of those who live with a smoker have measurable levels of toxic chemicals in their blood stream, setting them up for future harm from cancer, heart disease and a variety of other ailments.