This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Joseph R. DiFranza, MD
University of Massachusetts Medical Center Fitchburg

John W. Richards, Jr, MD
Medical College of Georgia Augusta

Paul M. Paulman, MD; Nancy Wolf-Gillespie, MD
University of Nebraska Medical Center Omaha

Christopher Fletcher, MD
University of New Mexico School of Medicine Albuquerque

Robert D. Jaffe, MD
University of Washington Seattle

JAMA. 1992;267(24):3282-3283.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

In Reply.

—Teens and preteens somehow get the idea that smoking makes one sexy, athletic, cool, or macho. The tobacco industry says these ideas come from their peers. No one asks where these peers—other kids—get these ideas. Yet, about the only place in our society where these silly images occur is advertising. So-called peer pressure explains little. It is merely a clever term used to shift blame from the manufacturer and advertiser to the user. Like peer pressure, "parental example" does not just spontaneously occur. Parents of today started smoking as children, and no doubt had similar silly ideas about what smoking would do for their images.

So few parents used spitting tobacco two decades ago that parental example cannot be used to explain the current epidemic of spitting tobacco use among children.¹ The dramatic increase in the number of children addicted to this form of tobacco followed an . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?