Can't Cut Teen Smoking By Alan Brody. But the issue is bigger than tobacco companies.
Adults tend to have a poor memory of their own youth and why they themselves became smokers.
It wasn't because the tobacco companies marketed to them. It was because they marketed to adults and, as teenagers, they desperately wanted to be adults. A lively grandmother in her 80s confided to me that she started smoking at 10 and quit at 40. That means she began smoking in the 1930s when cigarette ads were still focusing on tobacco leaf quality and Turkish flavor. There were no ads for teenagers and certainly none for pre-teens.