The rate teens become teen smokers has also increased up to fifty percent. In 1996, 77 out of every 1, 000 nonsmoking teens picked up the habit. In 1988, the rate was 51 per 1,000. The study was based on surveys of 78,330 Americans between the ages of 12 and 66 conducted by the CDC between 1994 and 1997. They asked if they ever had a daily smoking habit and if so, when they started. They were also asked when they smoked their first cigarette. There have been recent studies that prove that increasing the prices of tobacco will reduce the number of teen smokers. The tobacco companies know that increasing the price of tobacco will decrease teen smoking. Tobacco companies deny that they are increasing the prices of tobacco, but they still continue to recruit new smokers who are young. An estimated 420,000 teenagers were prevented from becoming smokers due to price increases in tobacco. The Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services sponsored a Tobacco Bill to ban all advertisements of cigarettes and an effort to help stop teen smoking. The Republicans in Congress turned it down. It was turned down because it was too expensive. The cost of this bill would have cost an estimated $52 billion dollars a year to send out strong messages to these tobacco companies.
I think that it should have been used because there are so many other things that our nation's budget spends on each year that does not seem as important. Teen smoking is a real serious issue because later on these teenagers will have some serious health problems. I see my friends smoking and I tell them that it will cause some serious health problems for them in the future. After the defeat of the tobacco bill in the senate, President Clinton scolded Senate Republicans for "Walking away from its obligation to our children" (qtd. in Kaleidoscope Interactive). He also called for the Department of Health and Human Services to conduct an annual national survey of the cigarette brands most frequently used by teenagers.
