Surprising Group is Topping the List of Area Smokers

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Story Published: Oct 7, 2009 at 10:24 PM PST

By Stacy Lilienthal

YAKIMA -- Smoking rates are going down throughout the area. But one group, you may not expect, is smoking steady.

Every year fewer people are grabbing those cigarettes and taking a puff. In Yakima it's down 2% in a year. That means Yakima and Franklin counties have fewer smokers than the state, and Benton has more.

Since the numbers have gone down, the American Lung Association says the real problem areas are narrowed down to two. The die hard, long term smoker group is one. A more surprising group is coming in second: sophomores in high school. 17-year-old, Nora Mercier said she's not surprised. "The sophomores at our school tend to leave campus just to go to smoke."

Action News asked the American Lung Association what they're doing to get through to these underage smokers. "We use high school kids that currently don't smoke and we use those kids to talk to elementary age school kids or even intermediate school kids," American Lung Association Tobacco Control Manager, Dan Smith answered.

So we asked teens if that's enough. "I don't think groups and posters are cutting it," 19-year-old, Sarah Fergeson started. "I think it just has to be that they need friends that don't smoke." "What do you think it would take to try to get that message across to that age group?" we asked 18-year-old, Bryanna White. "Probably people that have the consequences of what has happened to them after smoking," she said. That's the same message Mercier said they needed. "We had an assembly a long time ago where a lady had an actual lung of a person that smoked and healthy people that didn't. I think that really helped, but was really gross though." So at an age where those kids are testing their limits, teens say they need to see the guts and gore of cigarettes to know not to test them.

While smoking is on the decline, lung cancer is still on a rise in the Yakima area. Health experts say that's because the health effects of smoking can linger long after you quit.

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