New CDC Report: 1 in 9 Students in Middle and High School Use Tobacco

Over 3 million U.S. youth are estimated to have used a tobacco product in 2022, a new CDC report says. (Martin Rickett/PA Media)

About 1 in 9 students in middle and high school reported using tobacco products in 2022, according to a new study released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The just-released annual National Youth Tobacco Survey suggests that 16.5 percent of high school students and 4.5 percent of middle school students use tobacco.

It’s against federal law to sell tobacco products to anyone younger than 21. Yet more than 3 million youth in grades six through 12 use them, the study revealed.  

The study’s findings suggested links between higher tobacco use and poor grades, poverty, stress, LGBT lifestyles, and some ethnicities.

“Particularly concerning,” researchers said, was that almost a third of youth who said they used tobacco reported using a variety of products during the previous month. 

That suggests “nicotine dependence, which increases the likelihood of sustained tobacco use in adulthood,” researchers wrote. 

Tobacco in any form is unsafe for youth and is the leading cause of preventable disease, disability, and death in the United States, according to the CDC. Studies show that nearly all tobacco use begins during youth or young adulthood. 

Who’s Choosing To Use

Among students saying they receive grades of “mostly As,” more than 6 percent said they were current tobacco users. In the group that reported getting “mostly Fs,” more than 27 percent were using tobacco, researchers found. 

Students who reported having “severe psychological distress” were second-most likely to use tobacco—18.3 percent of them said they do. 

Almost 17 percent of transgender youth; 16 percent of lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth; and 12.5 percent of youth “with low family affluence” said they were using tobacco, researchers found. 

Of the students surveyed, 1 in 4 said they had used tobacco at some point in their lives. Girls were more likely than boys to have tried it. 

When compared to other ethnic groups, non-Hispanic American Indian or Alaska Native youth were most likely to use tobacco of any kind, the study shows. Black students were most likely to use combustibles, such as cigars and hookahs. 

Those findings “suggest ongoing disparities” possibly due to more tobacco ads aimed at those groups, researchers said. And it may be that more retailers sell tobacco in “racial and ethnic minority communities.”

Flavored disposable e-cigarettes, on July 18, 2022. (Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)

Cigarette smoking among youth does appear to have been “steadily declining during the past two decades,” researchers wrote. But comparing their findings to previous research is difficult because of changing methods of collecting information. 

Electronic cigarettes are, by far, the most commonly used product by youth. Cigars and cigarettes were a distant second and third in popularity, followed by all other tobacco products, including smokeless tobacco.

Progress in California

During the midterm elections on Nov. 8, Californians voted to uphold a law in their state banning the sale of most flavored tobacco products, including flavored e-cigarettes, menthol cigarettes, and flavored cigars. 

Eliminating access to those products could help snuff out much of the youth tobacco use in the state and provide “powerful momentum for similar action by other states and cities,” Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, wrote in a statement released on Nov. 9.

California lawmakers passed bipartisan legislation to ban flavored tobacco in 2020 “in response to the clear evidence that flavored products have fueled the youth e-cigarette epidemic,” Myers wrote.

Now, more than “2.5 million U.S. kids currently use e-cigarettes, and 85 percent of them use flavored products,” he wrote. 

Still, tobacco companies didn’t give up on the California market for flavored tobacco without a fight. 

“Tobacco giants Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds spent over $20 million on the referendum to overturn the 2020 law,” Myers wrote. 

They were defeated, he wrote, because voters were persuaded by “a diverse and determined coalition of over 200 public health, medical, parent, civil rights, education, business, faith, community, and other organizations, as well as elected officials from throughout California.”