excerpt from http://nosmoking.ws/news/newstobaccomarketskids0801.htm
Sara Bogdani had just turned 17 last summer when she slipped into a short skirt and started working as a Marlboro girl.
While the rest of her high school friends spent their vacation laboring in restaurants or lounging at home, Sara donned a red hat, a T-shirt with a cowboy on the back and a knapsack full of Marlboros and other Philip Morris cigarettes.
Then she hit the streets of Tirana, the capital of Albania and her hometown, offering a smile and a free pack to anyone who professed a love of smoking and looked, well, almost as old as she was.
"As long as they weren't 14 or something, it was O.K.," Sara said in a telephone interview, noting that a co-worker was also 17. As for her bosses, "they were just glad if you gave out all the cigarettes," said Sara, who now works with an antismoking group.
Just as it is in the United States, giving cigarettes to teenagers is illegal in many countries, including Albania, where Marlboro girls stroll the streets. But while the practice has all but disappeared from American cities, it goes on with striking regularity in many developing nations, and Philip Morris is far from the only tobacco company that the World Health Organization has accused of crossing the line in trying to entice those underage with free cigarettes.
A new study of schoolchildren 13 to 15 in 68 countries, conducted by the W.H.O. and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that about 11 percent of the children in Latin America and the Caribbean were offered free cigarettes by a tobacco company representative in 1999 and 2000. In Russia, nearly 17 percent said they had been given free cigarettes. In Jordan, it was 25 percent.
I think we're gonna be OK in the U.S. though.
Kids Giving Up Cigarettes For Cigars
Perhaps, an unintended consequence of the huge emphasis our society places on the hazards of smoking cigarettes: More people, particularly teenagers wanting to be "cool," are lighting up cigars, according to a new report.
Case in point: Although a New Jersey report found cigarette smoking among teens had dropped by some 30 percent, smoking cigars had increased among boys (17 percent) and girls (10 percent). Also, a 2004 survey of Cleveland teens found cigars consumption had exceeded cigarette use.
As if anticipating many teens may not like the typical taste of cigars, tobacco manufacturers have taken advantage of all the junk food marketing kids have been exposed to over the years by offering cigars in various flavors (apple, cinnamon and grape).
And, due to escalating taxes on cigarettes imposed throughout the country, it may be cheaper in some areas for teens to smoke cigars...