Brandon Vyse smokes Marlboros and Newports because that is what his parents and his friends smoke. He is 17 years old and has been smoking for about three years.
Why?
“My parents smoke. Peer pressure. My friends smoke. It
was cool then. And after it’s not cool anymore, it’s hard to stop, because then you are addicted,” said Vyse, who is headed for his senior year at Ombudsman Alternative Learning School in Schaumburg.
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Undoubtedly that is what Brandon Vyse, interviewed at Schaumburg’s Woodfield Mall in the wake of President Clinton’s decision to have a national crackdown on teen smoking, thinks about why he smokes.
But it is more complicated than that.
Decades after the tobacco-cancer connection was established, years after smokers have been cast as social pond scum, and deep in the heart of a nation that longs for nice, tight buns, firm breasts, full heads of hair and radiant, eternal good health, smoking is on the increase among young people.
The Centers for Disease Control, in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, noted recently that 600,000 adolescents began to smoke from 1985 to 1989, a 5.5 percent increase in that age group, even as smoking declined among young adults and older Americans.
The University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center pointed to the same conclusion a month ago, when it reported that 12th graders continued an increase that began in 1992, while youngsters in Grades 8 to 10 have continued the same steady increase identified in 1991.
“This is extremely bad news for the health and longevity of the next generation,” the Michigan researchers said.
Clinton and the Food and Drug Administration want to stop that and, arguing nicotine is an addictive drug, have proposed a broad new attack on teen smoking that will crack down on advertising, vending machine sales and over-the-counter sales to persons under 18.
But Clinton may be pushing the federal government toward one of its biggest social challenges.
There is a collection of publicly expressed guesses why teenagers are taking up smoking: Sinister but effective Joe Camel advertising campaigns by the now-demonized moguls of the tobacco industry; Marlboros as common as bubble gum; and “peer pressure,” that great catch-all used to explain weird teen behavior.
Besides, aren’t teenagers so spectacular at finding just the perfect, nails-on-the-blackboard kind of thing to drive their parents to distraction?
Why not smoking?
But teen smoking might be more about growing than about everything else.
It might not even be about cigarettes at the start, although it certainly is after a youngster has gone far enough past gagging and dizziness to have acquired a fondness for, and an addiction to, nicotine.
Growing up and the avenues young people pursue to shift from one stage of life to the next, bumpy transitions that lead to all kinds of troubling behavior, may be at the heart of the teen smoking problem, and that is a reality that goes beyond marketing, sales and government.
“A child may cling to a security blanket well into elementary school because it represents safety of an earlier familiar period,” said Chicago psychologist Dan Meehan, a child and adolescent specialist and educator who has worked with troubled children for more than 20 years.
“The child can’t explain it,” Meehan said. “It simply feels good. Smoking is a maladaptive transitional object. . . . In preteens, it provides a sense of connection to or inclusion in the adolescent world which they are about to enter. . . . I don’t think kids pay too much attention to Joe Camel. I think they are paying attention to the kid that they want to be like.”
And the culture they live in makes it all so easy.
Vyse said that when he was younger, he stole cigarettes from his parents. Now, even though he is too young to buy cigarettes legally, he can buy them almost anywhere.
He does not think he has been influenced much by the tobacco advertising campaigns because he does not read magazines, but he surely has bought into one key component of the program: incentive sales of all kinds of products based on “miles” coupons clipped from cigarette packs.
A smoker gets a “5-mile” coupon from each pack. Vyse and his parents put their coupons in a family pot at the end of each day. He recently sent away for a CD player (2,500 coupons) and cashed in earlier for a Marlboro sweatshirt and a backpack he carries to school.
Those promotional efforts should not be underestimated.
The CDC reported that among persons ages 12 to 17 in 1992, about 50 percent of the smokers and 25 percent of non-smokers said they had received promotional items from tobacco companies.
Meehan and whole platoons of other psychologists and child psychiatrists know they could shout, “IT’S BAD FOR YOU” until they all faint without having much impact on a teenager’s decision to start or stop smoking.
Dr. Mark Walker, an adolescent psychiatrist at Northwestern Medical School, said, “If the peer group smokes, they are much more likely to smoke. Although many teenagers deny being influenced by their peers, in fact, it’s probably the most predictive of whether they smoke or not.
“There’s also the basic problem that nicotine makes them feel better as a direct drug effect. All of the warnings don’t really matter by comparison with the fact that they like the drug effect. In particular, the warnings don’t matter because teenagers lack the same appreciation of their own mortality that adults have.”
It is not as if teenagers are saying, “I’m going to live forever, so what’s the difference?” But it is difficult for them to understand something that could be slicing years from the ends of their lives.
“They always say it’s going to take 10 years off your life, but those are the last 10 years. Those are the years you are in a wheelchair and Depends,” said one 15-year-old at Poplar Creek Bowl in Hoffman Estates. She did not want to be identified.
“Those are the ones I don’t want anyway,” she said.
Walker echoed Meehan’s comments about cigarettes as transitional objects. He added to that all children need to feel autonomous from their parents at some point and that cigarettes provide an easily accessible pathway.
“Some kids will use it to express anger in that their parents will know they’re smoking and will disapprove,” Walker said, “but the kids will make sure the parents find out and show the parents that they cannot be controlled.
“It’s a very convenient way of getting back at parents. . . . It’s harder to stop too. You like the effect of the drug. You feel like an adult. You can get back at your parents if you happen to be angry at them.
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“And you’re addicted.”
Walker rejects some of the cliches connected to smoking mythology, particularly the assertion among girls that it helps them avoid weight problems.
It takes a lot of cigarette smoking to suppress an appetite, so much that the smoker stinks of cigarettes.
Insecure young women do not like to stink.
“Girls who are hyper about their appearance and their weight, they are not always the smokers,” he said.
It is hard to say how much of a smoking decision is affected by advertising, one of the items the Clinton proposal targets. It would seem to make sense that tobacco companies would not spend so much money on ads if they did not do something in return.
Much advertising is aimed at keeping market share, not at persuading people to start smoking, although the distinction may be difficult to discern.
Ardent smoking opponents charge that ads make smoking glamorous and appealing to youngsters.
The industry asserts that it has been adhering to its own code for years, using models who are older than 25 and keeping billboards away from schools and children’s playgrounds.
But if the psychological arguments about smoking carry weight, that code is irrelevant. It would not matter, in other words, that a model is older than 25 and looks it to a confused youngster desperate to find some vehicle to help carry her to the next stage of her life.
Whether the billboard is close to a school seems equally irrelevant because in many cases, there are much bigger issues at play than those of images and access.
Some of them seem pretty subtle.
Tim Swaggerty, 14, started smoking when he was in the 6th grade because his big brother, three years older than he, smoked and let him bum cigarettes.
He has tried to quit, but most of his friends smoke and he has not been able to stop. His parents know he smokes. They used to take his cigarettes away. He said they still do not let him smoke around the house, but there is not much they can do about his smoking elsewhere.
Swaggerty was with his girlfriend, Lori Goff, 14, on Lake Street in Oak Park. Goff does not smoke, hates the very idea of it and gives Swaggerty no room on the issue.
“It’s bad for you and it looks disgusting. There are no good things about it,” she said.
At Scoville Park in Oak Park, Tony Mizicko, 16, was reading a book. He started smoking two years ago. He knows it is bad for his health and figures at some point he will stop.
“If everyone just stopped smoking at once, then I would too. It would just be easier then,” he said.
If cigarettes cost $6 a pack, that would help, too, he said.