The differences may turn on how kids define cool. “What you hear is that smoking is a white thing. It’s not what black kids do to be accepted by their friends,” says Michael Eriksen, Of the Centers for Disease Control’s Office on Smoking and Health. The shift is especially stunning, he says, because it didn’t result from some government education campaign. Instead, black leaders mobilized their communities against cigarettes marketed at black teens. A few years ago, Harold Freeman, director of surgery at Harlem Hospital in New York and an anti-smoking activist, installed posters in Harlem subways showing a skeleton, who resembled the Marlboro man, lighting a cigarette forablack child. The legend: “They used to make us pick it. Now they want us to smoke it.” In 1990, a group of Philadelphians who subsequently formed the National Association of African-Americans for Positive Imagery led a successful drive against R.J. Reyno s’s planned Uptown cigarettes, which many believed were aimed at blacks. This year, they protested Stowecroft Brook Distributors’X brand, claiming its packaging played on the colors of African liberation and Malcolm X’s name. Stowe croft pulled X off the market.
Why do white teens cling to the habit? One reason is that weight-obsessed white girls see cigarettes as their “secret” diet weapon. Then there’s the coolness quotient. Gen-X movies and photos of hip rockers and hot models portray cigarettes as appealingprops. And ever since James Dean curled a pack into his T shirt, rebellion has been part of the allure. For parents and educators, who’ve tried for decades to put a lid on teen smoking, the question now is how to expand on the black community’s success. But nobody, even the experts, knows how to take the cool out of Kool.
