Fall 2005 Issue
Evening the Odds
Foundation Awards Grants to Counteract Hip Hop Tobacco Ads
“A lot of kids start smoking because they think they’ll look cool,” says 15-year-old Felicia Mares, a high school student in Contra Costa County, CA. “But soon they don’t do it anymore for the popularity. They do it because they can’t stop. They’re addicted.”
Tobacco is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States, and yet, despite repeated warnings about lung and other cancers, heart disease and emphysema, each day nearly 4,400 young people between the ages of 12 and 17 start smoking. An estimated one-third of these young smokers are expected to die from a smoking-related disease later in life.
Felicia Mares and her classmate, 15-year-old Vincent Bonilla, know that smoking doesn’t make you “cool,” it just makes you sick. They are youth advocates in Empowerment Through Action, part of the Teenage Program in Contra Costa County, CA, and one of six recipients of a CDC Foundation grant to prevent smoking among urban youth.
In 2004, the CDC Foundation was awarded $965,000 to implement a program to reduce smoking rates among urban youth. The award was part of a court settlement agreement stemming from allegations that a tobacco marketing campaign based on hip hop music, dance and art violated the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement by marketing tobacco products to youth. Many anti-tobacco and youth advocate groups argued that the marketing campaign targeted young people in urban, often minority communities.
“After the court approved our comprehensive settlement, we wanted to find a national organization with the expertise to select groups with proven track records who would put the money to the best use,” says Marlene Trestman, special assistant to the Maryland Attorney General. “The CDC Foundation met all of the qualifications we were looking for.”
Working with CDC and other community partners, the Foundation used the funds to administer a competitive grant program. The Foundation issued a request for proposals and convened a panel of experts to select the final grantees based on their proven success at reaching youth with evidence-based smoking prevention and reduction strategies. The Foundation received 301 applications by April 2005 and announced the six final grant recipients the following October.
The grantees have significant challenges to overcome in communities where tobacco advertising is ubiquitous, rates of smoking and other risky behaviors are high and young people have few opportunities to engage in positive, healthy activities.
In 2004, tobacco companies spent an estimated $15.1 billion in marketing – more than $41 million a day – compared with $5.7 billion in 1997. Overall funding for programs that help prevent and reduce tobacco use, however, was cut 28 percent from 2002 to 2004.
“In the early 1990s there was a rapid increase in teen smoking prevalence rates,” says Corrine Husten, director of CDC�s Office on Smoking and Health. “The rates peaked in 1998 and 1999. Since then, prevalence rates have declined, and the nation is currently experiencing the lowest youth smoking rates on record. However, recent data suggests that the decline may be flattening. The progress we’ve been making may be stalling.”
And, although teen smoking rates are the lowest on record, when smoking translates directly to severe illness, disability and death, Husten says the rates are still not low enough. Currently, 22 percent of high school students and 10 percent of middle school students smoke.
The six CDC Foundation grant recipients deliver anti-tobacco messages and information to urban youth through programs that combine innovative methods with the “tried and true.” Husten emphasizes that a comprehensive approach is key.
“Rather than focusing on just one strategy, successful youth smoking prevention programs combine an array of interventions,” says Husten. A growing body of research helps organizations determine which interventions would likely be most effective in their communities, but Husten points out that creative approaches that make use of local resources and address local needs can be used to implement evidence-based approaches.
The Teenage Program in Contra Costa County educates middle and high school students about smoking and health in the classroom. Empowerment Through Action, the after-school component of the program, empowers students to fight health threats like tobacco, alcohol and drug use by taking action and creating change in their community. The program also engages parents, providing information about the role they play in helping their children make healthy decisions.
Felicia Mares and Vincent Bonilla became interested in the issue of tobacco as freshmen at Contra Costa County’s Middle College High School. They both remember attending a workshop where they were able t” touch a human lung from someone who had died of lung cancer. “It was a shocking moment,� says Mares. “Seeing the lung and touching the hard tumor was different than just hearing about it.”
Mares and Bonilla both joined Empowerment Through Action. They participated in “community walk arounds” that helped them compare how tobacco is marketed in disadvantaged minority communities and affluent white neighborhoods. Other activities challenged them to consider the messages tobacco advertisements convey and how young people might interpret them.
“We started to notice that cigarette and tobacco ads have really extravagant images of what young people might want to be,” says Bonilla. “The ads say you’ll look like that if you smoke, but it’s pretty much the opposite. You’ll probably have throat cancer.”
Says Teenage Program manager Ahna Ballonoff Suleiman, M.P.H, “When young people start to think critically about tobacco use as both a health issue and a larger community problem, they want to get involved and to find ways to create change.”
Recently, a group of student advocates successfully encouraged city council members to take measures to improve enforcement of a tobacco no-sales-to-minors law. Suleiman stresses that the ordinance was not a priority for the city council until the youth got involved.
“They testified about how easily they could get tobacco, how they were being assaulted by tobacco marketing, and how upset they were to see their friends and family engaged in a deadly habit,” says Suleiman. “And the city council finally listened.”
Suleiman and her team plan to use the CDC Foundation grant to continue to empower students to positively influence their peers and reduce tobacco use in their community. “The youth often come up with great ideas, but we don�t have the money to fund them,” says Suleiman. “Now we can say, �what’s your pie in the sky dream?’ And hopefully we can come a little closer to that.”
Mares and Bonilla just hope that they can positively influence some of their peers and that future generations continue their work in the anti-tobacco movement.
“By the time I graduate I hope that I save some kids from tobacco,� says Bonilla. �And I myself hope to stay tobacco and drug free.”