What are the solutions to stopping underage smoking?

As a responsible manufacturer and marketer of a legal, age-restricted product, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco is committed to ensuring that cigarettes are sold only to their intended market: adult smokers. That's why we have been working very hard to reduce youth smoking by implementing a strong program of education and training, and supporting access-limitation legislation and enforcement.

We take the youth smoking issue very seriously. We strongly support existing state laws in all 50 states that make it illegal to sell tobacco products to minors. And we support better efforts to help enforce those laws.

Our bottom line is that kids should not smoke. Period. But, let's face it: some do. Why?

Research has shown that the influence of peers and parents are the major determinants of underage smoking in children. Furthermore, minors are more likely to smoke if they can gain easy access to cigarettes. Based on this research, we have developed and implemented programs that address the real reasons why kids smoke.

Our Right Decisions Right Now program is an in-school program begun in 1991 that has been introduced to more than three million students nationwide. Thousands of brochures have also been distributed to parents discussing how to keep their kids from smoking. The We Card program, an industry-wide retail training program to curb illegal tobacco sales, has provided retailers throughout the country with more than 300,000 free training kits and in-store signage.

Right Decisions Right Now

It's not easy being a kid in today's world.

Young people entering early adolescence face myriad pressures and choices -- choices that can affect the test of their lives and decisions that are sometimes not easy to make.

From the day they enter school, American children begin learning of the health risks associated with smoking. Yet young people continue to smoke despite years of being told not to do so. Often unable of unwilling to turn to parents for guidance, young people are increasingly susceptible to the pressures and influences of peers.

RJ. Reynolds' Right Decisions Right Now program, an in-school curriculum series, addresses these issues and guides students in decision making. Among other things, the Right Decisions Right Now program:

* Helps teach young people how to make the right decisions regarding smoking, drinking and other important lifestyle issues they face as adolescents.

* Distributes its free, in-school curriculum program to more than 10,000 schools nationwide and reaches more than 3.5 million school children. The curriculum covers topics such as decision-making skills, refusal techniques, values, conflict resolution and responsibility.

* Uses teenage role models to help to deliver the message in student-focused pamphlets. Public service messages on radio, television, in movie theaters and special promotions at theme parks are designed to go where young people gather.

* Distributes wall posters that counter the peer-influenced reasons kids smoke to over 7,000 middle and junior high schools across the country.

* Provides new materials to schools, free of charge, on an ongoing basis. RJR's name of logo does not appear on any materials directed to young people.

* Makes three brochures, Tobacco: Helping Your Child Say No, How to Talk To Your Kids About Smoking Even If You Do, and Choices: Helping Your Child Make The Right Ones, available to parents to assist in their efforts to reduce smoking among underage youth.

In all 50 states, laws already exist making it illegal to sell tobacco products to minors. In 1995, R.J. Reynolds joined in the formation of an industry coalition comprised of major national retail, wholesale and manufacturing associations, and key cigarette and smokeless tobacco manufacturers. In 1996, the coalition launched We Card -- a national, community retailer program to prevent underage sales of tobacco.

The Coalition for Responsible Tobacco Retailing designed We Card to train sales clerks to comply with their state's minimum-age laws and provide them with the tools to uphold the law. The program also emphasizes the use of We Card signage on windows, doors and at all sales counters to alert the public that the store means business.

Practical means of reducing youth smoking are within our reach. By working together with parents, schools and retailers, we believe we are making a difference in addressing the issue. It begins by helping our kids make the right decisions. And it ends by enforcing the laws in all 50 states that make it illegal to sell tobacco products to minors. Andrew J. Schindler, President and CEO R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company

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