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Comment by dwhitney | Hacker News Reader

Contrarian view - the programs are working. Rates of smoking among teens over the past three decades:

Ever used nicotine: 70.1% in 1991 to 17.8% in 2021; Occasional use of nicotine: 27.5% in 1991 to 3.8% in 2021; Frequent use of nicotine: 12.7% to 0.7%; Daily use of nicotine: 9.8% in 1991 to 0.6% in 2021

https://www.fau.edu/newsdesk/articles/teen-cigarette-smoking...

I suspect the same can be said for workplace sexual harassment and outlooks on diversity. I agree that the programs are dumb and the trainings are dumb, but they have an effect.

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I think that can be chalked up to other changes like the wild increases in cigarette prices, the near elimination of advertising, and cigarettes becoming culturally uncool (orthogonal to DAREs attempts). Your link shows that during the heyday of these campaigns usage rates were still rising. They didn't really drop until after the approach was dialed back, and they dropped most appreciably after DARE gave up on anti-drug messages entirely.

The message of the article wasn't that you can't discourage drug use at all, it's that the means may be counterproductive. The means used in DARE were counterproductive.

It seems more plausible (to me) that this is the result of the cultural 'quarantine' of smoking and not the efficacy of the "don't smoke" programs in schools per se. The entertainment industry in the US aggressively committed to not showing cigarettes in a cool or positive light, and to me this seems way more likely to have driven these reductions in youth smoking. In the 80s pretty much any person a 13 year old would call 'cool' could be seen smoking somewhere. Now media uses cigarettes to either indicate that a movie is happening in the past or that a character is self-destructive. With the cultural cachet gone, or greatly reduced, I think what you're seeing is mostly 'background' smoking rates: kids smoking specifically for the effects of nicotine, or because it's a taboo-breaking behavior. Not because their parents and every celebrity smoke. This dynamic also explains the rise of e-cigs, IMO. Kids love streamers and influencers, and streamers and influencers vape nic. Now kids vape nic.

That's cigarette usage, not nicotine usage. Why would a teenager smoke when they can vape or use Zyns?

This isn't contrarian, this is just correct and well understood. What's contrarian is the article suggesting that any attempts to change people's behavior, no matter how well intentioned thought-out, actually result in the opposite of the desired outcome.

While the statement "kids are smoking less cigarettes" is correct, not sure if that's proof that the programs are working. Naturally, teens are filling the void of cigarettes with vapes and e-cigs, seeing as 26% of high school students (https://www.singlecare.com/blog/news/vaping-statistics/) have vaped.

Whether the programs are working or not is more of a debate, but don't want this cherry picked stat to go untouched.

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