TO HELL WITH WARNINGS: TEENS STILL LIGHTING UP

His brother proffered the first cigarette when Bryan Bergstaller was
9.

He sputtered and puffed. And by the time he was 10 1/2, Bergstaller
says, he knew the meaning of addiction. In Grade 5, sometimes he'd
feel jittery in the middle of class. When the recess bell rang he
would hide in a corner of the schoolyard for a smoke he'd bummed from
home.

Now 19, he wishes he'd never started. But he doesn't know how he'll
quit. He stopped for a week once, but he's back up to nearly a pack a
day.

A good proportion of his classmates at James Lyng High School in Cote
St. Paul smoke, too. They congregate behind the school and around the
snack bar across the street, lighting up as they spill out of class.
Just like Bergstaller, most of them started in elementary school.

Within 20 years, a quarter of them will have developed smoking-related
diseases, such as emphysema or lung cancer or heart disease. In 40
years, fully half will suffer a similar fate.

But none of that fazes them, of course. They laugh at the
public-service advertisements they see on television. Silly little
barn animals with cigarettes in their mouths. Who are they trying to
scare? They stare blankly at the school nurse as she explains the
deadly effects of cigarette smoke on the human body. Cigarette smokers
of all ages die prematurely at the rate of more than 40,000 per year,
they are told.

``Figure you're going to die anyway,'' shrugged Natalie Guillemette,
hauling on a Player's.

``Yeah, yeah, I know all the statistics,'' groaned Jennifer Dupuis, a
13-year-old student with serious attitude at Notre Dame de Grace's
Vezina High School who started smoking last September - just because
she felt like it. ``I'll quit when I want to. It won't be a problem.
Nobody can make me.''

More than 38 per cent of Quebec teenagers smoke. That's one of the
highest teen smoking rates in Canada, probably in North America.

Like their peers across the continent, the province's youth have taken
up smoking at alarming rates, even while cigarette use in the general
population levels off.

In a Quebec Health Department survey of high-school students in July
1997, the number who smoked jumped to 38 per cent from 24 per cent in
1994 and 19 per cent in 1991. Twelve years old was the average age at
which they took up the habit.

How to get them to stop, or not to start in the first place, has
become a burgeoning field of international study.

A decade of studies has demonstrated that virtually all addicted
smokers inhaled their first lungful long before the age of 18. The
reasons teens smoke are as complex and irrational as they are
themselves. A cigarette is a badge of daring or independence, a way to
look cool, to flout authority or to emulate a music idol or movie
star. For young girls, it's a way to stay thin.

``Instead of eating, I'll have a coffee and a cigarette,'' explained
18-year-old Brandi Rose, whose weight should hardly be an issue. ``I'd
eat more if I didn't smoke.''

A study of Canadian and British girls published last month in the
Postgraduate Medical Journal confirmed that teen girls smoke from a
fear of getting fat.

The study assessed body weight and smoking habits in 2,768 girls, aged
10 to 17, in Ottawa and in London, England. The girls listed smoking
as a substitute for eating and as a relaxing activity to curb appetite.

Health experts say an effective battle against teenage smoking needs
to work on several fronts - from raising prices and restricting
advertising to coming down hard on merchants who sell to minors,
prohibiting smoking in public places and organizing programs where

teens talk to teens.

For the first time, health officials and anti-smoking coalitions
across the continent say they may have finally figured out how to get
their message through: with a sustained, multi pronged attack.

They know now that preaching to kids doesn't work, and they know that
educational programs alone are not enough. Fifteen minutes of
lecturing in a classroom can't counter the prevalence of tobacco in
teenagers' daily lives.

After decades of funding a hodgepodge of school programs and sporadic
advertising blitzes, the Quebec government recently added substantial
weight to its anti-smoking campaign. New provincial anti-tobacco
legislation passed in June prohibits smoking in public, in schools and
in workplaces. It also bars the sale of cigarettes in pharmacies and
prohibits tobacco companies from sponsoring sporting and cultural
events. Anti-smoking activists have hailed the sweeping changes, but
bemoan the two-year grace period the government has allowed for
phasing them in.

What the law aims to do, says Lucy Williams, who runs teen programs
for the Quebec Council on Smoking and Health, is attack the social
acceptability of smoking. Kids have really sensitive antennae for
hypocrisy, she says. Why should they listen to the anti-tobacco
preachings of educators who withdraw to the teachers' lounge for a
cigarette after class, or parents who themselves smoke? When Wayne
Gretzy lights up a stogie on the cover of a cigar magazine, Jacques
Villeneuve pulls up in his tobacco company-sponsored Formula 1 racecar
and Julia Roberts oozes sultriness swathed in a cloud of smoke?

``We send kids a lot of double messages,'' said Roberta Ferrence, a
senior scientist at the University of Toronto and director of
Ontario's Tobacco Research Unit. ``We've made cigarettes cheap by
lowering the taxes. We allow the tobacco companies to sponsor and
promote music festivals and sports events. All around them,
celebrities and movie stars are smoking. What do we expect?''

Alain Goulet, 14, of Vezina School, has a hard time listening to
preaching from adults. Both his parents smoke at home. He's tried to
quit, but the sight or smell of someone lighting up has always sent
him scrambling back to his old habit. He says he smokes now when he's
stressed out or pissed off or just hanging out with friends.

He'd have a hard time if he lived in Florida. Last year, Florida made
it illegal for those under age 18 to possess tobacco products. Police
have cited thousands of juveniles for smoking and ordered them to pay
$53 fines or do eight hours of community service. Repeat offenders
face suspension of their driver's licenses or are barred from getting
one. In Idaho, violators face up to six months in a juvenile detention
centre.

The government of British Columbia last year targeted teen smoking as
its most pressing health concern. It launched the toughest
anti-smoking offensive in Canada, introducing legislation making it
easier to sue cigarette manufacturers for smoking-related health care
costs, and bringing in a hard-hitting publicity campaign. The ads -
showing real people - mean to dispel the glamour often associated with
smoking in the tobacco industry's marketing and promotion. One shows a
young woman who started smoking to lose weight get steadily thinner
and sicker; another depicts a former model for a cigarette company who
lost her vocal cords to smoking. Another shows a smoker who lost a
lung at age 24.

A new Tobacco Fee Act allows B.C. to charge a licensing fee to tobacco
manufacturers selling cigarettes in British Columbia. These fees,
expected to total about $20 million a year, fund tobacco-education
programs. And tobacco manufacturers are required to list the toxic
ingredients contained in their products.

``This is not about punishing people who are addicted to cigarettes,''
Health Minister Penny Priddy said when she announced the program in
June. ``It's about making the industry and not taxpayers pay for the

prevention and cessation programs needed to prevent future generations
from becoming victims of tobacco addiction and smoking-caused
illnesses.''

Eric LeGresley, legal counsel for the national Non-Smokers' Rights
Association, has recommended the federal government alter the health
warnings on certain brands of cigarettes, such as DuMaurier and
Player's, favoured by teenagers. Instead of lung cancer and emphysema,
they would warn about wrinkles and impotence. And the cigarettes would
come in a plain brown wrapper, not a flashy red or black box.

``Warnings of major calamity that will happen 20 years down the road
do not resonate with 12- and 13-year-olds,'' LeGresley said in an
interview from Ottawa. ```We need to be able to make cigarettes a
source of ridicule. Not being able to get it up is a really big deal
to an adolescent boy.''

California is one of the few places in the industrialized world where
teenage smoking rates have actually dwindled, thanks to Proposition
99. Launched in 1990, the California Tobacco Control Program imposed a
25-cent surtax on each pack of cigarettes and an equivalent amount on
other tobacco products. The revenues go to education, enforcing
tobacco control laws, research and health care resulting from
tobacco-related illness. There's even a toll-free telephone snitch
line so people can call in to report merchants who sell cigarettes to
minors.

It helped that most municipalities and county governments across the
state had already passed their own local ordinances making public
buildings and workplaces smoke-free, before the state passed its law.
Across California there are few places where smokers can indulge their
habit, except for their cars and homes or out in the woods. Even bars
and taverns are off-limits and some towns have banned smoking in
outdoor lineups.

Since the start of the program, California's adult smoking rate has
dropped - from 26 per cent of the population to 18 per cent in less
than a decade. Youth smoking is down by one-third, to 11 per cent of
all minors.

``We want to push tobacco use out of the charmed circle of social
acceptability,'' said Jon Lloyd, a spokesman for California's Tobacco
Control Program. ``Kids grow up in a world shaped by adults. That's
why we need to change the whole social environment they live in.''

Two perennial problems plaguing Quebec's attempts to curb teen smoking
involve easy access and inadequate resources at the school level.

It is easier for children and teenagers to buy cigarettes in Quebec
than anywhere else in Canada. Health Canada regularly sends underage
children into stores across the country to see how many merchants are
willing to sell tobacco products to those under 18, despite a federal
law prohibiting it.

In the Montreal area, 55 per cent of stores were willing to sell to
kids, compared with 22 per cent in Vancouver and 29 per cent in Ottawa.

In his three years of smoking, 19-year-old Alain Haddad says only one
depanneur, on St. Emilie St. in Cote St. Paul, refused to sell him
cigarettes. Most merchants never ask for identification, even from 9-
or 10-year-olds.

Another problem is resources. One of the favoured new teen
anti-smoking programs is La Gang Allumee, a network of teenagers
trying to persuade other teens, and younger children, not to smoke.
They get federal funding to stage plays and rock shows with an
anti-smoking message in schools around the province. The biggest
problem isn't reaching recalcitrant teens, says program organizer
Williams of the Quebec Council on Smoking and Health. It's finding
teachers, parents or school staff willing to oversee their efforts in
schools hard hit by budget cuts. For that reason, Williams says, she
has managed to introduce the program into only one-quarter of Quebec
high schools.

Colin Kenny, the Liberal senator who sponsored Bill S-13, the Tobacco
Industry Responsibility Act, says nothing short of an all-out assault
will work.

His bill, which has passed the Senate and is set to come before the

House of Commons this fall, would slap a 50-cent levy on every carton
of cigarettes sold in Canada. The projected $120 million in annual
revenue raised would be distributed to community and national groups
across Canada working on the front lines against tobacco addiction
among the young.

Ottawa currently collects $2.1 billion a year in tobacco taxes but
spends only $20 million to fight smoking.

``There's no magic bullet, no one way to stop kids from smoking,''
Kenny said in an interview this week.

``It's an uphill battle, a long-term fight.''

Checked-by: Rich O'Grady