Goal Area 1: Preventing Commercial Tobacco Use

The SUTPP and the CDC share the goal of reducing the health burdens of tobacco use by preventing new tobacco use (CDC, 2014b).

A related effort in some local and state tobacco prevention programs has been to raise the legal age of purchase from 18 (or 19 in some jurisdictions) to 21 (see https://tobacco21.org/). President Trump signed a bipartisan bill that raised the minimum legal sales age for all tobacco products in the U.S. (including ENDS) to 21 (FDA, 2021). This legislation, known as Tobacco 21 (T21), went into effect on December 20, 2019. On March 13, 2020, Governor Gordon signed a similar law specific to Wyoming, and the law became effective on July 1, 2020 (SF0050, 2020). Broad surveys, such as the ATS, with few young adults in the sample are not strong methods for showing short-term effects of T21.

A key limitation for findings in this section is that many of the relevant survey questions ask about events (such as when someone first smoked a whole cigarette) that happened years before data collection. Therefore, responses to such questions are especially subject to memory errors. However, precise recall is not critical to the conclusions in this report.

Age of Smoking a Whole Cigarette for the First Time

The age of first smoking a whole cigarette is related to long-term smoking habits (CDC, 2014b).

In 2021, almost all (91%) of the Wyoming adults who had ever smoked an entire cigarette smoked their first one before the age of 21 (Figure 11). Moreover, the vast majority of them smoked their first cigarette before they were 18, with an average age of 16. This pattern has remained consistent since comparable questions were first asked in 2010.

Conclusions

The vast majority of smokers begin when they are under the age of 21, especially under the age of 18. ATS data are consistent with other research findings that the earlier someone starts smoking, the more likely they are to continue smoking (Dierker et al., 2012; Sharapova et al., 2020). Wyoming may benefit from continued tobacco prevention efforts focusing on youth, though ATS data may not show results until years after success with youth happens.