Up in smoke: Nevada’s teen smoking rate among highest in nation

Friday, July 19, 2002 | 2:41 a.m.

WEEKEND EDITION: July 20, 2002

How to say no Suggestions from the pamphlet "Eight Ways to Say No to Smoking Without Losing Your Friends!" by Tara Leonard, c. 1995 by Journeyworks Publishing:

Growing up in a Las Vegas home where six of nine family members smoked cigarettes, Jake Hammond found it easy at age 8 to pick up the habit.

Not even witnessing his father suffer a heart attack and subsequently give up smoking deterred Hammond, now 16, from lighting up as a boy.

Ten years too young to legally purchase cigarettes, Hammond would just steal a few from each pack he found lying around the house.

At age 9 the clean-cut youngster "graduated" to smoking and selling marijuana, earning enough money to buy all of the cigarettes and pot he wanted.

An honor roll student in elementary school, he became a junior high dropout.

Jake's addictions eventually brought him to WestCare, a local rehabilitation center, where recently he was a proud graduate of the Not on Tobacco teen smoking cessation program.

"I feel great now," the soft-spoken Hammond said, noting he soon will return home and to the ninth grade and feels he now has the tools to avoid smoking.

Despite a wealth of education available on the dangers of tobacco, Hammond is one of an alarming number of adolescents to start using tobacco.

The American Lung Association estimates that 3,000 adolescents each day take up cigarettes, snuff, chewing tobacco, pipes or cigars. If today's statistics hold true, 1,000 of them eventually will die from smoking-related diseases.

Nevada has one of the nation's highest teen smoking rates at 33 percent, 8 points above the national average. It mirrors the state's high adult smoking population of 28 percent, 6 points above the nation's adult average.

"We take a total health approach to helping adolescents quit smoking," said Gilbert Madrid, health coordinator of WestCare's NOT program, funded by $100,000 from the multimillion-dollar tobacco companies settlement fund.

"We use methods like teaching stress management and we help them develop more healthy lifestyle behaviors, like engaging in physical activity, eating foods with better nutrition and practicing interpersonal skills."

Madrid, whose program has been in place for one year and is so far enjoying a 75 percent success rate, said the evidence that smoking leads to other drug use is overwhelming.

"Ninety percent of our clients who are brought in for substance abuse also are cigarette smokers," he said, noting that the vast majority started smoking before taking up drugs like marijuana, methamphetamine and alcohol.

Brian Caperonis, 18, a WestCare resident who began smoking at age 11, grew up in a home where his dad and stepmom did not smoke. His friends got him started.

"I liked smoking -- it made me feel older," Caperonis said. "I was up to a pack and a half a day and also was doing weed and meth. I dropped out of school in the 10th grade."

Madrid said Caperonis is one of the few program students who received medical assistance to help quit -- the nicotine patch -- because he was heavily addicted to smoking.

Getting help

Some Las Vegas organizations that will help people stop smoking:

Millie Zozaya, 15, began smoking four years ago and, at her peak, was smoking a pack a day. The diminutive girl feels that cigarettes took a significant toll on her health in a very short time.

"I had no energy to run or do anything else athletic," said Zozaya, noting that after she started smoking, she took up meth and alcohol. "It was all peer pressure. The first time I smoked I coughed and really didn't like it. But I kept doing it anyway. Later I found I couldn't quit."

She went from A's and B's to flunking the eighth grade. Now approaching the midway part of the program, she looks forward to returning to school in the fall smoke-free.

Madrid sees about 30 kids a month in the Thursday afternoon NOT classes.

Although the program addresses long-term dangers of smoking such as emphysema and even death, Madrid said addressing "the here and now" works much better.

To that end, the materials the kids receive in the class stress things like "smoker's breath is gross" and "yellow teeth are ugly."

The teens said they are confident they won't ever smoke again.

Perhaps Caperonis gave the best reason for that decision: "I like talking to girls, and many of them don't want to be with a guy who smells like an ashtray."