It’s hard to argue with Mr. Gross Mouth — a graphic description of what can happen after years of smoking — or even the Jar of Tar, which shows the amount of tar that can be accumulated in a pack-a-day smoker’s lungs after one year.
Such antismoking visuals are a part of the Tar Wars program, an annual presentation all students in the Iowa City School District attend.
Tar Wars is one of the ways Iowa City schools are trying to prevent high-school tobacco use.
The fight against high-school smoking has been fairly successful in recent years. “Healthy People 2010,” a national health initiative, resolved 10 years ago to decrease smoking among high-schoolers in the United States to 16 percent.
The Healthy People initiative reports that nationally, 19.5 percent of high-schoolers smoke. In 2000, 31.4 percent of U.S. high-school students smoked, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website.
The number of Iowa City high-school students who smoke is lower than the national level. According to an annual district survey this year, only 13 percent of Iowa City high-school students said they had ever used tobacco — a decrease from 15 percent in 2009 and 17 percent in 2008.
“The overwhelming percentage of [Iowa City] students don’t use tobacco,” said John Bacon, the principal of City High, 1900 Morningside Drive.
Health instructors use real-life stories to put tobacco risks into perspective for Iowa City students. Hearing from speakers with health problems associated with tobacco makes the dangers seem real, said Susie Poulton, the district’s health-services director.
Iowa City schools address tobacco use in the classroom starting in kindergarten, which helps prevent troubles in high school, where students are at highest risk, Poulton said.
“The earlier the addiction starts, the harder it is to quit,” she said. “It’s hard for adolescents to understand what could happen 10 years down the road, because of where they’re at developmentally.”
Iowa City’s 13 percent is almost 7 percent lower than Iowa’s average, according to the most recent Iowa Youth Tobacco Survey, completed by the state Department of Public Health.
The survey also shows that 51 percent of high-school students who smoke have tried to quit at least once.
Smokers who want to quit, particularly young smokers, usually neglect to seek professional help, said Mark Vander Weg, a University of Iowa associate professor of internal medicine. “[High-school students] lack knowledge about the resources available, and they don’t want their parents to find out they smoke.”
This makes cessation a greater challenge for smokers who are underage.
“We are lacking in pediatric practices, as far as detecting underage smokers and helping them quit,” Vander Weg said.
To combat this for those fresh out of high school, the UI offers a class resource for would-be quitters with the Tobacco and Your College Experience course.
The rates of tobacco use among Iowa high-schoolers have gone down by 39 percent since 2000, according to the Iowa Youth Tobacco Survey.
And district and state officials remain hopeful for a further decrease.
“We are working to bring high-school smoking rates down to 15 percent or lower,” said Bonnie Mapes, director of the Iowa Department of Public Health’s Division of Tobacco-Use Prevention and Control.