I remember getting my first candy cigarette from a classmate at school when I was eight years old. I had no idea what it was, but it seemed pretty exciting and, despite my unusually high discount rate when it comes to candy (ask anyone in my family), I ended up saving it for when I got home.
This turned out to be a huge mistake. My mom saw me "smoking" and completely flipped out. From then on candy cigarettes were banned from my house (and, to this day, my mom gets mad if my sister and I pretend carrot sticks or pens to be cigarettes or cigars). Later, enough mothers were upset by the whole idea that candy cigarettes were banned from my elementary school, as well.
What worried moms across the country was the possibility that smoking candy cigarettes would induce children to take up the real thing a few years later. Is there good evidence that candy cigarette use has a causal effect on later smoking? I trolled around the internet and found some interesting links off the candy cigarettes Wikipedia page. As it turns out, there IS a study on the association between candy cigarette and nicotinic cigarette use (see here for a summary and here for the actual piece). Here are the findings (lifted from the abstract):
26.4% of respondents reported current smoking and 29.4% reported former smoking. Candy cigarette use was reported by 88% of both current and former smokers and 78% of never smokers (p ≤ 0.001). Logistic regression showed that the odds of smoking for those who used candy cigarettes was 1.98 (95% CI: 1.77, 2.21) for ever (current plus former) smokers and 1.83 (1.59, 2.10) for current smokers, compared to those who had not used candy cigarettes. Odds for current and ever smoking increased with increasing candy cigarette use.
The main issue here, of course, is whether the link between candy cigarettes and smoking is causal. For example, if individuals who really want to fit in use candy cigarettes to appear "cool" and later smoke for the same sense of social acceptance, one would see an association between the two behaviors, but this association certainly would not be causal. Even so, the results are pretty intriguing and worthy of further exploration.
2 comments:
I'm amazed that someone did that study. Excellent.
This is interesting. I wonder if theres any variation in policies about candy cigarettes in the US across states or across countries, or any other type of variation that one might use to help get at the identification problem here. This reminds me of some legislation that I followed last year about Congress debating whether to ban flavored cigarettes since these may increase tobacco consumption for children. They did not want to ban menthol cigarettes at first because they thought it would discriminate against blacks. But thankfully the black political lobby pointed out that it would be discriminating against them NOT to include mentholated tobacco in the bans that they are considering.
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