TriCounty Health Department is involved in an effort to educate youth regarding tobacco and promote prevention efforts in the basin.
Our new scholarship program was able to get off the ground this school year and we have a number of high school seniors working to promote tobacco prevention in highschools throughout the area.
Traditionally, youth in rural areas have been exposed to higher levels of tobacco advertising and these cultural ideas such as the Marlboro man, tobacco use is edgy, and now vaping is the new trend in the culture exist due to the fact that roughly 1 million dollars an hour is spent by tobacco companies to advertise their products.
What people, especially teenagers, don’t realise is the fact that tobacco companies have privatized their profits and outsourced their risks. The goal of tobacco companies is to get as much nicotine in a teenager’s brain as possible and get a lifelong customer addicted to tobacco products in order to make money. The tobacco companies do not care at all about the health or addictions of their clients.
Our goal is to push back against this industry and empower people to make their own decisions based on sound health information, not obscure cultural ideas derived from tobacco company advertisements.