Facilitating Adolescent Smoking: Who Provides the Cigarettes?

Purpose. Most adolescent smokers obtain cigarettes through social sources. We examine the extent to which cigarettes are provided by facilitators of legal age to purchase cigarettes. Design. Analyses of data from the 1999 California Tobacco Survey, a large population-based, random-digit–dialed telephone survey, are reported. Setting. California. Subjects. Data were from a subset of 1239 adolescent (12–17 years) respondents who reported ever having smoked a cigarette. The response rate for all adolescents selected for interview was 75.5%. Measures. We describe cigarette providers to adolescents in social (cigarettes given to the adolescent) and economic (someone else buys cigarettes for the adolescent) transactions by the reported facilitator's age. Results. Of the 82.2% ± 2.6% of adolescents who had ever smoked who usually obtained cigarettes from others, 21.6% ± 2.5% used economic transactions; most (60.6% ± 3.4%) were given cigarettes. The majority (73.3% ± 3.6%) of those relying on social sources were given cigarettes by someone <18 years of age; very few were given cigarettes by someone 21+ years old. Most (90.4% ± 2.0%) usually given cigarettes reported friends as facilitators. Of those who relied on economic transactions, 56.1% ± 6.6% reported facilitators who were 18- to 20-year-olds, another 24.7% ±6.3% had suppliers ≥21 years of age. Altogether, 80.8% ± 5.8% of facilitators in economic transactions were ≥18 years of age. Conclusions. Until peer approval of smoking and sharing cigarettes and adult facilitation of adolescent smoking is reduced, it will be difficult to significantly reduce adolescents' access to cigarettes.