Source: Ottawa (Ont) Citizen (ca)
Date: 2010-02-17,

Smoking always sounds like yesterday\\\'s health issue. Didn\\\'t we
settle this one decades ago? Actually, no -- as some depressing
new data on youth smoking reveals.

The figures come from Statistics Canada. StatsCan provides the
useful service of surveying the smoking habits of more than 9,000
Canadians twice a year, with a special focus on people under 25.
The new data point to something significant happening in Quebec:
The proportion of teenagers who smoke jumped three points, to 20
per cent. . . .

The good news is that it need not be a losing battle. New York
City launched a six-year blitz against youth smoking and cut the
rate by more than half, as measured at the end of 2007. That\\\'s a
drop from 17.6 per cent to 8.5 per cent -- far better than
anything Canada has achieved. New York authorities believe that
their efforts will prevent thousands of premature deaths.

The lesson here, and of all anti-smoking efforts, is that
smoking remains the biggest single cause of preventable deaths.
In today\\\'s gene-obsessed world, it\\\'s easy to adopt a
deterministic attitude toward health and wellness. But that\\\'s a
mistake. People are not born smoking. It is an acquired
behaviour, and it will make you sick.