Teen Tobacco Use

The issue of teenage smoking in the United States proves a major and highly controversial subject between how to prevent it and how to stop big-business tobacco companies from targeting children. For the purpose of gathering information about this topic, I used various different search engines; however, SIRS Researcher was the most resourceful one. In fact, when using SIRS Researcher you had the ability to type in exactly what needed and in most cases the information searched (sometimes articles came up completely preposterous) came up. Although, SIRS Researcher was the easiest to use, OmniFile Full Text Mega proved much easier to use for the works cited because all of the information was posted in a similar style format. Furthermore, I collected enough information on this topic to understand the subject of teen smoking, why teens choose to smoke, and what cities and states are doing to prevent it. For example, according to Bill Phelps, a spokesman for Altria in a interview by Steve Leblanc of the Cape Cod Times, teens may not even know why they smoke and that the reasons are often complex. Therefore, he stated “There is no single reason why young people engage in risky behavior such as smoking… there should be a multifaceted approach to embrace youth smoking.” Though, it should be noted that Altria, the company Bill works for, a father company to many big tobacco companies, meaning his words may just be hollow promises to take action on teens smoking; so then, if teens stop smoking a large profit would be lost making him earn less. Indeed, many places happen to take on the issue of teen smoking with a serious and stern approach, with positive results. In fact, Massachusetts has put a state wide smoking ban in many places throughout the state- especially in restaurants- which have barred teens from smoking in public, and if caught they will have to pay a hefty fine. Subsequently, since the passing of this smoking ban from 2005 to 2007 the percent of high school smokers dwindled from 21 percent to 18 percent, a significant amount (Leblanc). Unfortunately, though, not everywhere has had this much success in banning smoking, like in Philadelphia where Martha T. Moore reveals teen smoking is a huge issue and teens daily try and buy cigarettes while under the age of 18 in her article “Philly Targets Underage Smoking.” Sometimes, teens even succeed in buying the cigarettes, like in the case of an investigation by the city’s health department where they sent out local high school student to Philly’s 4300 Tobacco retailers and they succeeded in buying them 25 percent of the time. This statistic shows that teens are not completely to blame for their tobacco use, seeing as storeowners willingly sell them cigarettes. Though, not all storeowners comply, Mike Maiale, of Big Nick’s Cold Cuts in downtown Philly said in an interview with the USA Today, “I get them every day, I have to card twice a day.” In addition to that Mike goes on to say “My wife got caught, I could have killed her” when she was caught selling to an older looking teen, in which the deli got fined (Moore). In short, a small number of people or storeowners truly care about teens smoking because of the profit involved and how lucrative it can be. Above all, in my opinion this project proved rather tedious and aggravating because of all the busy work and technicalities involved. For example, the use of SIRS Researcher and OmniFile Full Text Mega didn’t work as well as the “google” method in my views, though learning how to used those researchers will certainly benefit me in college and in later years of schooling. Certainly, if the “google” method was used, it would have made the entire process easier as more people would know how to operate the search engine and get more results instead of being very specific and still not getting the results you had searched for. Indeed, the information found on SIRS Researcher and OmniFile Full Text Mega has value, but if I had an opportunity to make changes to the project, I would open up the project to some use of the “google” method and other big name search engines just to keep some familiarity in the project for the students. All in all, I learned myriad alternative methods to find information and it will absolutely benefit me in the future and in my college years.

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