Youth and Tobacco

Tobacco use, which includes smoked and smokeless tobacco products, continues to be the leading preventable cause of morbidity and mortality in the world. This underscores the urgent need for prevention of the onset of tobacco use. Since only very few initiate smoking or become habitual smokers after their teenage years, adolescence might be the decisive phase to prevent smoking behaviors that lead to significant smoking-related disorders in adulthood. Therefore, ‘youth-centered' tobacco control efforts are very important, and must be expanded and improved. Many smoking prevention programs and measures focusing on young people have been developed and used worldwide. They include school-based educational interventions, community interventions, media-based health promotion efforts and public education, tobacco advertising restrictions, restrictions on youth access to tobacco, increase in tobacco excise taxes and further more recent innovative smoking prevention efforts. Although these efforts achieved marked progress in the fight against tobacco consumption worldwide (according to the WHO, 3 billion people are now covered by national antitobacco campaigns and, as a result, hundreds of millions of nonsmokers are less likely to start smoking), it still remains a significant challenge to reduce smoking prevalence and tobacco consumption among children and adolescents.