Smoking and Tobacco Control Monograph No. 7 
DR. GIOVINO: The numbers in those categories became very small. You 
know, at 6 mg or less, it was 10 or 12 percent. At 1 mg, the numbers would 
have been .... 
DR. BENOWITZ: So, no one is smoking them. 
DR. GIOVINO: Very small numbers, yes. 
DR. FREEMAN: Do you have any guess or reason why young black males 
in particular are smoking so much less today, since it is obviously not a 
function of education. Do you have any sense of why that is happening? 
DR. GIOVINO: What Dr. Freeman is referring to are the trends in the High 
School Senior data, in National Health Interview Survey data among people 
18 to 24, in the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse data, the Youth 
Risk Behavior Survey data, the TAPS data, and others, that show that African- 
American youth are much less likely to smoke than white youth. 
1 will take 2 minutes, because it is an interesting study. It is not a school 
dropout effect, because when we look at dropouts, white kids who have 
dropped out are much more likely to smoke than African-American kids. 
Also, regardless of race and ethnicity, all kids who drop out are more likely 
to smoke. 
We don't believe that it is because they have switched to other drugs. 
We have looked at Monitoring the Future data, and it does not look like 
cigarette smoking has been replaced by an increased use of alcohol and 
other drugs. 
There are some data to suggest that differential misclassification may 
explain some of the difference. There was a paper by Karl Bauman in the 
American Journal of Public Health that showed that African-American youth 
may be a little more likely to differentially underreport in a household 
survey. Household surveys pose the most serious concerns about 
confidentiality, unless serious steps are taken to protect confidentiality. 
We see lower smoking rates among blacks in school surveys, where 
there is greater privacy. And even in Bauman's household survey, mean 
validated tobacco use was three times higher in white youth than in African- 
American youth. 
To answer your question in more detail, variables like discretionary 
income, parental education, importance of religion, and how well they do 
in school do not explain it. In other words, the trends seem to be down in 
African-Americans more than white youth in just about all the subcategories 
that we have carved out. 
There are ex[)lanations, and some were presented in the 1994 Surgeon 
General's report: There have been changes in attitudes about smoking, 
and the attitudes held by African-American youth changed in a much more 
health-promoting direction than the attitudes among white youth. There 
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