Study says fewer using cigarettes
Jump to full article: Boston (MA) Globe, 2008-05-06
Author: Elizabeth Cooney Globe Correspondent
Intro: Restaurant smoking bans may be as powerful as peers or parents in the battle to keep teenagers from becoming smokers, a new study suggests.
Teenagers who lived in towns that adopted early bans on smoking in restaurants were 40 percent less likely to become smokers than their counterparts in towns with weaker restaurant smoking laws, Boston researchers report.
The study did not address how smoking bans discourage teenage smoking. But Dr. Michael Siegel of the Boston University School of Public Health said the findings bear out his hypothesis that if teens see fewer people smoking and conclude that smoking isn't socially acceptable, then they may be less likely to pick up the habit.
Writing in the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine, Siegel reported results from three waves of phone surveys in 301 Massachusetts towns starting in 2001. . . .
Since 2006, counseling and medications to help smokers quit have been covered by MassHealth, the state's Medicaid plan, and the benefit has been used by more than 10 percent of members, she said.
Public health efforts aimed at adolescents have been reinvigorated, including the launch of the84.org, a website with antismoking ads created by teenagers and named for the 84 percent of their peers who don't smoke.
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