Stop kids getting hooked – nearly 9,000 North East kids start smoking each year
FRESH has described new figures from Cancer Research UK showing 8,911 North East children start smoking each year as “scandalous.”
Campaigners from the North East’s regional tobacco programme say the government needs to ensure tobacco companies can’t attract “replacement smokers” to plug the gap of those who die or quit.
It is now seven months since the national Government consultation on plain, standardised packaging for tobacco closed, with no decision yet made by Ministers.
Ailsa Rutter, director of Fresh, said: “I’m appalled that 24 North East kids start smoking every day and get hooked on an addictive product that kills half of all long term smokers.
“We should be angry that multinational tobacco companies want families across the UK to tolerate their kids growing up to be smokers, just because their profits depend on it. Whether you smoke or not, nobody wants their children to start.
“Kids start smoking for a number of reasons including peer pressure and growing up in families where it’s normal to smoke, but other issues such as tobacco promotion and seeing smoking in films play a major role.
“We trust the Government will accept the strong evidence that standardised, plain packs would make smoking less attractive to children and stop disguising the harm smoking does.
“How tobacco firms can claim packaging doesn’t play a part when they have packs that look like Lego and make up is beyond belief.”
Although child smoking rates are a concern, they have fallen significantly over time as fewer adults smoke.
Latest North East figures for children 11-15 smoking from the Smoking, Drinking and Drug Use Among Young People – England, 2011 shows that 6% of boys and 8% of girls aged 11-15 were “regular” smokers and 26% of boys and 30% of girls had ever tried smoking.
The last time this survey was regionalised (2006-08) it found 35% of boys and 49% of girls had ever smoked, and 6% boys and 14% girls were regular smokers.
Figures nationally also show that in 1982, 11% of kids aged 11-15 were regular smokers, but that figure had dropped to 5% by 2011.
New figures show that only 6% of people in the North East say they trust the tobacco industry to tell the truth.
Half of all long term smokers will die from tobacco related illness. Around 100,000 people are killed by smoking in the UK each year.
With so many children starting to smoke each year, Cancer Research UK is urging the government to commit to plain, standardised packaging of tobacco. Research has shown that children find the plain packs less appealing and are less likely to be misled by the sophisticated marketing techniques designed to make smoking attractive to youngsters.