 On June 22, President Obama signed a bill that he hopes will help kids make the choice not to use tobacco, the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act. Do you have any idea how many people under age 18 will smoke a cigarette for the first time today? Three and a half thousand, and a third of them will become regular users! One goal of the new law is to reduce the number of young first-time users to 1,000.
The federal government will now be regulating the content, marketing, and sale of tobacco products. The law banishes Joe Camel and other youth-oriented advertising gimmicks and bans fruit-flavored tobacco products. You won’t be seeing colorful billboards of happy people holding cigarettes within 1,000 feet of playgrounds filled with grade-schoolers at recess. In fact, all tobacco advertising within 1,000 feet of schools is now illegal.
In response, we wouldn’t be surprised if more states started promoting tobacco education efforts like New Jersey’s . There, students at every grade level study the nature of tobacco and its physiological, psychological, sociological, and legal effects on themselves, their families, and society under the state’s Core Curriculum Content Standards and Comprehensive Health and Physical Education Curriculum Framework. To find out whether your state has tobacco education standards – and for lots of interesting facts about kids and smoking -- visit the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.
If you’re looking for materials for students or teachers and families about the biology of nicotine, visit the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA). You’ll even find a high school curriculum guide there, The Brain: Understanding Neurobiology through the Study of Addiction that educators can order for free. High school students might want to check out an interesting article about the American Legacy Foundation’s successful “truth” anti-smoking campaign [in the June/July 2009 American Public Health Association’s newspaper] or a NIDA press release about research that shows that black and white adolescents metabolize nicotine differently.
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Speaking of NIH curriculum supplements for high school, we are POISED to reprint the updated 2009 version of The Brain: Understanding Neurobiology Through the Study of Addiction. 
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