Tobacco Use :PROGRAMS MOST LIKELY TO WORK

3. Counter marketing, to be effective, needs sufficient "frequency, duration and reach" to be successful. A variety of messages has been shown to be more successful than repeating the same message over and over. Smoking causes bad breath. Smoking causes cancer. Show a child having an asthma attack while someone smokes nearby.

4. Establish a smoke-free facility. This may make some staff members unhappy. However, if you are going to tell students not to smoke, you cannot have teachers smoking in the lounge, staff smoking in their offices.

5. Offer a program to help students (and staff) stop smoking. Counseling, group programs and pharmaceutical methods such as nicotine gum and nicotine patches have all been used successfully. We have even seen smoking cessation programs written into a student's IEP. He was a 15-year-old chain smoker with a behavior disorder who was constantly getting into trouble in school for, among other reasons, violating the no-smoking rule. The school covered his nicotine patches, and it did help the problem with smoking, allowing us to focus on his other behaviors like swearing at the teachers and threatening other students.