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Statement by Dr. Cheryl Healton, President and CEO, American Legacy Foundation® on the Centers for Disease Control's Report on Cigarette Smoking among High School Students 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention today included a report, Cigarette Use among High School Students -- United States-2007, in its weekly Morbidity and Mortality Weekly report.

The American Legacy Foundation, the national public health foundation devoted to keeping young people from smoking and helping all smokers quit, is encouraged by some of the report's findings. It is positive progress that youth smokers who had ever tried smoking in their lifetimes declined from 70.1 percent in 1999 to 50.3 percent in 2007, after a stable period from 1991-1999. This suggests that smoking may be becoming increasingly de-normalized in our culture; with fewer young people seeing smoking as mainstream or a rite of passage. In addition, the prevalence of current frequent youth smokers (those who have smoked more than 20 cigarettes in the preceding 30 days), declined, although this decline was not significant from 2006-2007. In that group, prevalence rose from 12.7 percent in 1991 to 16.8 percent in 1999, but dropped to only 8.1 percent in 2007.

However, the more troubling data in the report found that the prevalence of current cigarette use among high school students remained virtually unchanged from 2003 to 2007. This

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