Adolescent smoking

Abstract

It is over forty years since the public health community came to the consensus that smoking tobacco, particularly cigarettes, caused lung cancer. Despite widespread dissemination of the likely health consequences, cigarette smoking is still a prevalent behaviour in all developed countries and is a rapidly increasing behaviour in developing countries. There is an extensive literature on quitting studies indicating that, for many smokers, successful quitting is one of the hardest lifestyle changes to achieve. Given this, many argue that the majority of the emphasis should be on preventing the initiation of smoking in the first place. This chapter focuses on influences encouraging young people ..