Hey girls! With back-to-school coming up, we hope you are excited and ready to be leaders in your school, committed to telling your girlfriends that smoking stinks! We've gathered some new facts and statistics about girls and smoking that you can use to share the oriGENal voice message. For you athletes, check out this report about the benefits for girls and sports from the CDC Tobacco Information and Prevention Source.

Research has shown that students who participate in interscholastic sports are less likely to be regular and heavy smokers. Students who play at least one sport are 40% less likely to be regular smokers and 50% less likely to be heavy smokers. Regular and heavy smoking decreases substantially with an increase in the number of sports played. (Escobedo LG, Marcus SE, Holtzman D, Giovino GA. Sports participation, age at smoking initiation, and the risk of smoking among US high school students. JAMA, March 17, 1993; 269:1391-1395.)

The lower rates of smoking for student athletes may be related to a number of factors: (Escobedo, 1993)

• Greater self-confidence gained from sports participation.
• Additional counseling from coaching staff about smoking.
• Reduced peer influences about smoking.
• Perceptions about reduced sports performance because of smoking.
• Greater awareness about the health consequences of smoking.

Special Benefits for Girls and sports ...

Smoking becomes a way for preteen and teen women to build a sense of self and stay connected with peers in the face of enormous pressures to be beautiful, successful, sophisticated, thin, independent, and popular -- seductive images that are reinforced in movies, music videos, and advertising. (Edwards P. Evening the odds: Adolescent women, tobacco and physical activity. Ottawa: Canadian Association for the Advancement of Women and Sport and Physical Activity, 1995.)

Sports and physical activity are positive, viable alternatives to smoking in the lives of young women. They can give adolescent women the very benefits they perceive in smoking: independence, status with their peers, a chance to make friends, relaxation, weight management, and a more positive sense of self. (Edwards P, 1995)

• Girls who play sports have higher levels of self-esteem and lower levels of depression than girls who do not play sports. (Edwards P, 1995)
• Girls who play sports have a more positive body image and experience higher states of psychological well being than girls and women who do not play sports. (Edwards P, 1995)
• Girls who play sports learn about teamwork, goal-setting, the experience of success, the pursuit of excellence in performance, how to deal with failures, and other positive behaviors -- all of which are important skills for the workplace and life. (Edwards P, 1995)

This year’s Texas Round-Up fitness festival provided another successful event that helped oriGENal voice raise awareness about Big Tobacco and the dangers of smoking.

Held in April, the Texas Round-Up was a statewide effort to encourage Texans of all fitness levels to incorporate daily physical activity and healthy choices into their lives. Governor Perry teamed up with a number of Texas companies and organizations -- including the Texas Cancer Council -- to motivate Texans to add at least 30 minutes of exercise, five days a week, through a special 6-10 week program. The Texas Round-Up festival included dozens of physical activity workshops and health-related booths, live music, health screenings, a Governor’s Challenge and a Texas-sized 10K run.

At the oriGENal voice booth, girls received information about the program and had an opportunity to sign pledge cards committing themselves to say “NO” to smoking. More than 170 teenage girls signed tobacco-free pledges at the festival and the oriGENal voice message reached more than 300 people! Thanks to Governor Perry and the Texas Round-Up staff and volunteers for making the event a huge success for Texas and oriGENal voice!

On Saturday, April 10, 2004 the oriGENal voice girls came together to rock out for a great cause: living tobacco-free! The first annual Smoke-Free Battle of the Bands at the Hard Rock Café in downtown Austin was a huge success! With help from oriGENal voice partners including GENaustin, the Texas Cancer Council, Scott & White, and the American Cancer Society, we delivered smoke-free messages to more than 200 people. More than 50 Austin girls signed pledge cards committing themselves to be smoke-free!

The event featured four high school bands - Army of the 12 Monkeys, Forgetting April, Later, and Johnny Fish and the Minor Deities - with crowd-favorite, Later, taking home the grand prize: production time to record a song for an upcoming GENaustin benefit CD and a gift certificate to Strait Music. Special thanks to our Battle of the Bands judges: Jim Butler with the City of Austin, Deirdre Gott with KISS FM, Roberto Ainslie, a local DJ, Kat Jones with Milkshake Media, and Kate Kelly, a founding member of oriGENal voice.

Appreciation also goes out to the Austin Chronicle and the Austin American-Statesman for featuring the event in calendar section, and to local businesses Flipnotics Coffeespace, Alamo Drafthouse and DartBowl for donating prizes.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the First Annual Smoke-Free Battle of the Bands. We look forward to another great show next year!

We are GENaustin girls telling our friends, girls in the Austin community, their families, and their support network of teachers and other community leaders about the dangers of Big Tobacco. For years, the Tobacco Industry has invested billions of dollars to persuade young women to use their deadly products.

We are strong girls. We have a powerful voice. We are the future and deserve to live long, prosperous and healthy lives. There is nothing cool about death and disease. Why contribute to an industry that makes billions of dollars from selling their deadly products to young girls?

Every year, tobacco-related disease kills more than 178,000 women, making it the largest preventable cause of death among women in the U.S. Furthermore, smoking has been responsible for the premature deaths of approximately 3 million women since 1985, and women who die of a smoking-related disease lose, on average, 14.5 years of potential life.

We will not become a future tobacco statistic

...we are oriGENal!

I have an oriGENal voice!
I will speak out against Big Tobacco in my community!
There are other girls like me who pledge to be tobacco-free!

• Girls and young women get addicted to cigarettes more quickly and for different reasons than boys. (The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University, The Formative Years: Pathways to Substance Abuse among Girls and Young Women Ages 8-22)
• Tobacco-related disease has reached epidemic proportions among women in the U.S. as a result of tobacco industry marketing directly to women over the past several decades. Chek out this terrific report on tobacco industry targeting of women and girls from Tobaccofreekids.org.(PDF)
• Today, 457,000 girls under 18 are likely to become daily smokers and 146,000 girls under age 18 are likely to die prematurely from smoking. (Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids)
• Every day, more than 4,000 kids under 18 try smoking for the first time, and another 2,000 kids who have already experimented with cigarettes become regular new smokers. (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)
• At a cost of $3.28 (+ tax) per pack, the average smoker smoking a pack-a-day will spend more than $1,100 a year to support their habit.
• Adult male and female smokers lose an average of 13 and 15 years of life respectively.
• Nearly 90% of adult smokers began at or before age 18
• A 1994 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association documented a rapid and unprecedented increase in the smoking initiation rate of adolescent girls following the launch of women’s cigarette brands like Virginia Slims in the late 1960s.
• Teenage girls often start to smoke to avoid weight gain. They also seek to identify themselves as independent and glamorous, which reflect images projected by tobacco ads (American Lung Association).
• Social images can convince teens that being slightly overweight is worse than smoking. Cigarette advertising portrays cigarettes as causing slimness and implies that cigarette smoking suppresses appetite.
• In 2001, 27.7 percent of high school girls were current smokers, meaning they smoked at least once in the 30 days preceding the survey. In addition, 12.9 percent were frequent smokers, indicating that they smoked on 20 or more of the 30 days before the survey was taken.
• Since the 1920's, the tobacco industry has targeted women with images ranging from liberation, glamour, slimness, and feminism.

Know what the advertisers DON'T tell you! Check out this fact sheet from the CDC Tobacco Information and Prevention Source

Marketing to Women and Girls: Fact Sheet.

• More than 30% of surveyed high school girls in Texas smoke. (1998 Texas Youth Tobacco Survey; Report 1: Current Tobacco Use; Bureau of Disease and Injury Prevention, Texas Department of Health)
• Almost 40% of Texas high school girls said they would try smoking in the next year. (1998 Texas Youth Tobacco Surevey; Report 1: Current Tobacco Use; Bureau of Disease and Injury Prevention, Texas Department of Health)
• There are almost 60,000 new youth smokers each year in Texas. (Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids: Key State-Specific Tobacco Related Data and Rankings)
• Nearly 500,000 kids alive in Texas today will die prematurely from smoking. (Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids: Key State-Specific Tobacco Related Data and Rankings)

See out what other Texans are doing to stop tobacco-use in their communities:

• Worth It
• OTPC (Office of Tobacco Prevention and Control)
• Tobacco Free Amarillo
• STEP (Texas Statewide Tobacco Education & Prevention)
• STOPN (Spit Tobacco Prevention Network)
• TCADA (Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse)

Check out these National Anti-Tobacco Programs:

• Tobacco-Free Kids
• Big Tobacco Sucks! (Campaign Against Transnational Tobacco)
• American Cancer Society's Great American Smokeout
• American Legacy Foundation
• American Cancer Society - Click here to see what's happening in your community.
• American Heart Association - Click here to see what's happening at your local AHA chapter.
• American Lung Association
• Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights Foundation

GENaustin

The Texas Cancer Council
The Texas Cancer Council is the state agency dedicated to reducing the human and economic impact of cancer on Texans through the promotion and support of collaborative, innovative, and effective programs and policies for cancer prevention and control.

American Cancer Society
The American Cancer Society is fighting tobacco by empowering youth, giving smokers the tools to quit, and communities the resources to ensure clean indoor air.

Community Support Provided by:
Dobie Middle School
Michael Ham, After School Program Director
414-3270

For more information on oriGENal voice please call 414-0476

This site was last updated on 11/24/2004.

Copyright © GENaustin, Inc. 2001. All rights reserved. GEN, GENaustin, and GENaustin logos used and displayed herein are registered and unregistered trademarks of GENaustin, Inc. All other trademarks, service marks and logos used herein are the property of their respective owners. Email us at office@genaustin.org.