Original articleAdolescents’ acquisition of cigarettes through noncommercial sources
Section snippets
Methods
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s 1996 National Survey of Tobacco Price Sensitivity, Behavior, and Attitudes among Teenagers and Young Adults (RWJF Survey) was the data source used in this analysis. The sample sizes, respondent selection procedures, and weighting procedures were designed to develop national estimates of adolescent smoking behaviors and attitudes.
Results
Among the 47% of adolescents who usually acquired cigarettes through noncommercial sources, most either got them through friends or got someone to buy them (Table 1). Those who acquired cigarettes by noncommercial means smoked fewer cigarettes per day and on fewer days per month than those who purchased their own cigarettes (Table 2).
An inverse relationship was found between age and the likelihood of acquiring cigarettes through alternative means (Table 3). Compared with 13- and 14-year-olds,
Discussion
More restrictive point-of-sale legislation was enacted in part to respond to data indicating that youth found tobacco products easily accessible [14]. By making tobacco products either actually or apparently more difficult to obtain, this legislative effort may have pushed adolescents to noncommercial sources of tobacco, although additional data would be needed to further investigate this hypothesis. This study found that those who believed it was difficult to obtain tobacco were nearly twice
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