Fewer Ontario teens are getting behind the wheel after drinking alcohol and teen smoking is at an all-time low in the province, according to new research from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

Smoking and smokeless tobacco use are usually initiated during adolescence. More than 80% of adult smokers begin smoking before 18 years of age. Additionally, adolescent smokeless tobacco users are more likely than nonusers to become adult cigarette smokers.1,2,3

Some teens take up smoking because they think it makes them look older, but it doesn’t. To most people it just looks like you’re making a big mistake, and like you’re trying to make yourself look older.

Sean Marsee had won 28 medals at track meets. He was a very popular and respected athlete at his high school. Thinking it was safe, Sean began chewing dip tobacco in his mid-teens.

One by one, the teenagers in crisp white T-shirts took a seat before the Hopkinton Board of Selectmen. They had data. They had well-rehearsed pitches. And, they told the board, they wanted local support to close a loophole in state law that bars minors from purchasing cigarettes but not from possessing them. “As it is, it is illegal to buy or sell tobacco products in the community, but if say a 12-year-old were able to magically procure some cigarettes and start smoking on the common, law enforcement can’t do anything about it,’’ Mitch Saeger, 18, told the elected officials last week.

Adolescents who don’t smoke appear more likely to take up the habit over a nine-month period when they report greater exposure to cigarette advertisements, a large German study showed.The longitudinal study, conducted among more than 2,100 students ages 10 to 17, found that 13% of the teens started smoking during the study, according to Reiner Hanewinkel, PhD, of the Institute for Therapy and Health Research in Kiel, Germany, and colleagues.

Nick Maiale of Big Nick’s Cold Cuts in Philadelphia does not sell cigarettes to anyone under age 18. Not that he doesn’t get asked.”I get them every day,” he says of teenagers trying to buy cigarettes despite the law against selling to minors. “I have to card twice a day.” Only once, he says, has the deli been fined for selling to a kid. “My wife got caught” by a teen who looked older, Maiale says. “I could’ve killed her.”

Like other companies, the tobacco industry uses marketing strategies, such as ads in magazines and posters, to sell its products .These marketing strategies, the National Cancer Institute notes, usually target children and teens, the future of our world. Placing cigarettes in windows and behind counters, as well as tobacco ads in retail locations, are the main reason that children and teens begin to smoke.