How Can You Help Others Stay Tobacco-free? Lesson Idea
Objectives
Build an awareness of the dangers of smoking.
Provide positive nonsmoking images and schoolwide support for the decision to be tobacco-free.
Create an opportunity for all students to pledge formally not to smoke.
Recognize that the decision to smoke is influenced by outside forces such as peer pressure and advertising.
Identify reasons why teenagers start smoking.
Prepare
Ask students to bring to class tobacco advertisements from magazines or newspapers.
Materials
Tobacco advertisements
Explore
1.
What are some statistics that tell us the extent to which smoking can lead to premature death? (If you
smoked 20 cigarettes a day, your life would be shortened by about five years; every cigarette you smoke
takes about five minutes from your life; for every 1,000 young adults who smoke regularly, one will be
murdered, six will be killed in road accidents, and 250 will die before the age of 65 because of smoking; in
the United States, an average of 430,700 people die each year due to smoking.) Suggest that students
graph the statistics.
2.
Have students look at the tobacco ads they brought in. Point out that tobacco companies spend billions of
dollars each year advertising their products. What kinds of pictures do cigarette companies use to persuade
people to smoke or chew tobacco? (The ads show attractive young people, fun social occasions and
beautiful scenes of nature and interesting places.) Do these pictures fit with the facts about tobacco that you
have learned? (No. Images of health and happiness do not fit with the reality of diseases and early death.)
What kinds of words are used in the tobacco ads you found? Encourage discussion of the positive words–
pleasure, smooth, success, enjoy, satisfying–used in the ads. Talk about how advertising works, pointing out
that people do not usually stop to analyze an advertising campaign but are attracted to a product through
clever appeals to the emotions. The positive words and pictures in tobacco ads influence people to
subconsciously relate smoking or chewing tobacco to pleasurable feelings.
Have several volunteers read the Surgeon General’s warning from their ads. How much space in each ad is
used for the Surgeon General’s health warning? (Very little. Although the warnings are not presented in ―fine
print,‖ they still take up a very small percentage of the ad space.) How might you make the warning more
noticeable and more convincing? Encourage students to be creative. They might suggest enlarging or
rewording the warning or adding blackened lungs or a gravestone.
3.
Invite students to create a new kind of tobacco ad campaign, one that presents cigarettes and chewing
tobacco in a realistic light. Think about the techniques that tobacco companies use to sell their products.
How might you use those same techniques to present the truth about smoking cigarettes or chewing
tobacco? Encourage discussion. Instead of pictures that make tobacco use look attractive, illustrations might
show the ways in which smokers are often ostracized and inconvenienced. Instead of using positive words
that make chewing tobacco sound appealing, negative words that present the truth–dirty, nauseating,
stench, deadly, disgusting, offensive--could be used. Instead of presenting the Surgeon General’s warning
as it is now, in just a corner of the ad, student’s revised warning could be used as the main text of the ad.
Then have each student create a tobacco-free ad using the advertising techniques discussed in class to
present tobacco use in a realistic way. Encourage students to display their ads throughout the school with
the slogan ―Tobacco—The Real Story.‖
4.
In conjunction with the display of tobacco-free ads, encourage the class to organize a schoolwide tobaccofree campaign. Students may work in small groups, with each group handling one of the following activities:
o a pledge, in poem or rap form, not to smoke
o a skit illustrating the negative aspects of smoking
o a letter-writing campaign to local politicians advocating the participation of both young people and
adults in eliminating smoking.
Encourage students to use humor and hard facts. Help them get permission to present their campaign in
schoolwide forums—including over the public-address system, in assemblies and in the school newspaper—
as well as in the community.