THANKS, JOE

Smoking, drinking and drug use are declining among American teens, according to this year’s update of an annual national survey that began more than quarter-century ago. Contained within this good news are valuable lessons about what works in teaching kids about taking better care of themselves. And we may have Joe Camel to thank for it.

The survey is “Monitoring the Future,” the research is conducted by the University of Michigan, funded by the National Institutes of Health, the data were collected from more than 44,000 students in grades eight through 12 in nearly 400 public and private secondary schools throughout the country. Since its inception in 1975, the study’s scope has expanded from tracking smoking habits to include alcohol and drugs, both legal and illicit.

With a few troubling exceptions – such as steroids and crack cocaine – drug use is down to the lowest levels since the early ’90s. The most pronounced decline is in the use of ecstasy, a synthetic “club drug” that soared to popularity a few years ago with a reputation as being harmless but that now is linked to kidney, heart and brain damage. More than 52 percent of 12th-graders say they are aware of these dangers, an increase of 14 percent over two years ago. Marijuana use is down as well, particularly among the younger kids.

Alcohol use dropped among all three age groups in the survey. Among 12th-graders, 71.5 percent said they had consumed alcohol in the past year, down from 73.3 percent in 2001. Sixty percent of 10th-graders said they had used alcohol in the past year, down from 63.5 percent in 2001; 38.7 percent of eighth-graders said they had used alcohol in the past year, down from 41.9 percent in 2001.

But the best news is about tobacco. Smoking rates for eighth-graders have been cut in half since 1996, with the percentage of teens who said they had smoked in the last month falling from 21 percent to 10.7 percent. Among 10th-graders, the decline was almost as large, and or high school seniors, the smoking rate fell by one-quarter to one-third.

Explanations for these important declines in tobacco use include higher prices, less tobacco advertising that reaches young people and more effective anti-tobacco messages. All of those changes came about after cartoon pitch-animal Joe Camel came on the scene, shameless pandering by Big Tobacco that galvanized public opinion against the industry, that emboldened lawmakers to act and that led to the historic settlement that funds much of the anti-tobacco and increasingly effective pro-health messages reaching American kids. Thanks, Joe.