Depressing statistics

It’s hard to say which is more depressing about a recent survey on smoking: the fact that Maine’s anti-tobacco programs for teen-agers produce the worst results in the nation, or the number of teens who have tried to quit the habit only to discover they already were addicted. The survey is ample evidence that Maine’s upcoming anti-smoking campaign is long overdue.

At the rate Maine teens are smoking, one child in nine will die a tobacco-related death. Many will wheeze through middle age, eventually become housebound and succumb to heart and lung diseases that are entirely avoidable. Its a terrible risk to take for the thought that smoking looks cool. Nevertheless, Health Director Dora Anne Mills reported this week that 38 percent of high-school boys and, surprisingly, 41 percent of high-school girls smoke.

The rate for girls is particularly alarming not only because it exceeds the boys’ rate but because it is much higher than the national average, which is 34.7 percent for girls. Director Mills doesn’t know why an unusually high number of Maine teens are smoking, but it would be worth a lot of health care money to find out. What is it about Maine that puts it at the top of the charts? It’s a question worth answering because too often the early temptation sets a pattern for the rest of a teen’s life. One-third of teen smokers — who had been puffing for just a couple of years — have tried to quit and failed, according to the survey.

But even before the question of why so many teens start smoking can be fully answered, the state’s new media campaign to encourage them to quit will have begun. Higher cigarette prices to pay for the campaign and discourage teens from buying already have been put in place. One bright spot in the survey: new, tougher rules on unannounced inspections of places that sell cigarettes have had a positive effect. In 1995, 20 percent of 11-graders who tried to buy cigarettes illegally were successful. Last year, that percentage had fallen to 12.

Most parents will go to any length to keep a child from harm. Here is tobacco, a known killer that Maine children have welcomed as it has been welcomed nowhere else, being allowed to rob years from these lives. Maine’s new tactics in the fight against cigarettes has a culture to change and no time left to waste.