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Happy New Year! January is here and we know you are ready for
another great year of helping teens stop using tobacco. We wish you
the very best!
-Amy DeNoyer and the Community Intervention staff
| What Movies Did Your Teen Watch Over the
Holidays? |
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What movies did your teen watch over the holidays? If
your teen watched: The Ant Bully, Material Girls, Talladega
Nights, The Pirates of the Carribean, Stay Alive, You, Me and
Dupree or Superman Returns, then they watched movies with the
highest amount of smoking according to the American Medical
Association Alliance which found that for the past seven
years, PG rated movies(movies aimed at teens) contained more
smoking than R-rated ones.
"Movies deliver billions of
glamourized pro-smoking messages to adolescents" acording to
James Sargent, M.D. and a professor at Dartmouth Medical
School. According to the AMA Alliance, smoking in movies has
been implicated in the cause of 390,000 new teen smokers every
year and estimates that 120,000 of them will eventually die
from long term tobacco use. (Globalink US Discussions
December, 2006)
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| States Not Spending Money on Youth Tobacco
Programs |
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 Five states currently do not provide any money for
programs that encourage youth not to smoke. The states are:
Missouri, Michigan, New Hampshire, Tennessee and Mississippi,
according to the report entitled "A Broken Promise to Our
Children" done by a coalition that includes The Campaign for
Tobacco Free Kids and the American Heart, Lung and Cancer
Societies.
Missouri's health department spokesperson
disagreed with the report and claimed that Missouri has an
anti-smoking program in 115 school districts called
Smokebusters and that they do spend a portion of the $900,000
they receive from the CDC (The Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention) to "dissuade young people from smoking" but did
not state what the portion was.
Missouri will collect
nearly $246 million dollars this year from the 1998 tobacco
settlement and tobacco taxes. None of which will be spent on
tobacco prevention efforts. According to the CDC Missouri
should spend $32.8 million dollars annually on smoking
prevention. The Missouri state health department spokesperson
added that in 2006 the governor proposed spending one million
dollars of the fiscal year budget on smoking prevention but
that the funding was cut by state lawmakers.
Although
Missouri is one of the states that has the highest percentage
of smokers, the percentage Missouri high school students who
smoke is 21.3% compared to the national average of 23%.
According to the report, only Colorado, Maine and Delaware
fund tobacco prevention programs at the levels recommended by
the CDC and twenty eight states are spending less than half of
what the CDC recommends. (Associated Press, posted on
KansasCity.com December 6, 2006)
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| Roads, Rats and a Clean House? |
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Here is a fun way to get youth in your TAP/TEG
groups thinking about what is in the cigarettes they are
smoking. Make up fun questions backed up with hard hitting
facts that create a mental picture for them.
For
example: What do roads, rats, a clean house, car exhaust,
nail polish and forensic medicine have in common with
cigarettes?
Answer:
They all contain chemicals
that are used in cigarettes such as:
TAR: Used
to pave streets and roads.
Hydrogren Cynanide: Rat
poisen.
Benzene: Used in manufacturing
gasoline.
Acetone: Found in nail polish remover.
Amonia: Used to clean houses.
Formaldehyde:
Used for preserving dead bodies, isfound in glues and
adhesives and is used as an industrial fungicide.
Carbon
Monoxide: Car exhaust.
Would they really want to put
all that into their bodies on purpose? This is just one
example of a fun way to help re-enforce what you are hoping
they will gain from TAP/TEG. You could also have them
come up with their own word association reminders to help them
help themselves reduce or quit smoking. (Smoking Facts for
Teens and Parents, November 2006)
January Question of the Month:
Among the
youth in your TAP/TEG groups have you seen an increase
in alterantive forms of tobacco used? Bidis? Kreteks?
Smokeless tobacco? What alternative tobacco products are the
boys and girls using?
The first five people who respond
to me in detail will receive their choice of five each of the
TAP/TEG student workbooks.
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| The Facts on Secondhand Smoke |
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Do you need more information for all the naysayers that
think secondhand smoke is not harmful? Here are are a few
facts for them!
Secondhand Smoke:
*Fills
the air with many of the same poisens found in the air around
toxic waste dumps
*In a restaurant pollutes the air with
six times the amount of air pollution caused by a busy
highway
*Causes up to 300,000 lung infections such as
pneumonia and brochintis in infants and young children each
year.
*Kills about 3,000 nonsmokers each year.
(Smoking
Facts for Teens and Parents, November 2006)
TAP/TEG Training dates and locations March 12-13,
2007 Indianpolis, IN
March 26-27, 2007 Minneapolis, MN
April 3-4, 2007 Helena, MT
April 9-10, 2007 Elkton, KY
Training dates added weekly. Watch our website for
details.
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