The 36 percent drop in the number of teen smokers over the last four years is an encouraging but unexciting statistic until you consider that the drop represents more than 10,000 Maine teen-agers. About 60 percent of smokers eventually succumb to smoking-related diseases, so it’s fair to guess that the comprehensive campaign to persuade teens to stay away from cigarettes will save 6,000 lives in Maine. Any vaccine, surgical operation or magic elixir that could produce similar results would be hailed as a miracle.

But the decrease announced by the Maine Department of Human Services last week is even better than that. Children of parents who smoke are much more likely to smoke themselves, so getting teens to quit or avoid starting means that the next generation will be healthier. And Maine, once among the states with the highest rates of teen smoking, is now down around the national average and still declining while it appears the national numbers are leveling off. Perhaps most encouraging, 72 percent more teens report they are trying to quit compared with their counterparts in 1997.

Credit for this partial success – partial because there remains too many kids who still take up the addictive habit – belongs

to many. Raising the tax on cigarettes helped substantially, as did the media campaign and the increased opportunity for help quitting. The noncompliance rate for stores selling to minors fell from 44 percent in 1997 to about 5 percent today, a sure sign that the easy access kids have had to this dangerous product is now not so easy. The peer media campaign undoubtedly has helped. And groups like the American Lung Association of Maine have been working hard on this problem since before it had such a high profile.

Still, about one in four Maine high-school students smoke, according to the latest state numbers, pushing the goal of a healthy Maine a long way off. Plenty of young Mainers, apparently, don’t know or don’t believe that the pay-off for not smoking – healthier living, the avoidance of illness and a longer life in addition to lower medical bills – are easily a good trade for giving up cigarettes.

That means the state and all the nonprofits working on this problem, while appreciating the progress they’ve made so far, have a lot of work to do in the next several years. Six thousand lives is a lot, but there are plenty more who could be helped.