Smoking by adolescents: Three years later, there’s an even larger revenue but little for prevention

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether any changes occurred between 1990 and 1993 in the State Government revenue gained from the sale of cigarettes to minors and in the proportion of this revenue spent trying to prevent the uptake of this habit by adolescents. The method employed in this analysis is consistent with that of the 1990 study published in The Australian Journal of Piblic Health (19, 29–33), although some revisions were necessary. The prevalence of smoking by minors was extrapolated for the individual states from the prevalence for Australia, and estimates of annual cigarette consumption were coupled with the respective cost of cigarettes in each state to derive an estimate of the total revenue accumulating from cigarette consumption by minors.