To the Editor:
After reading a few pieces in The Dartmouth surmising the level of cigarette use on campus, I thought I would add my two cents.
Through annual surveys of representative random samples of Dartmouth undergraduates, we've been able to track changes over time concerning cigarette use. This information is gathered to help the health educators focus their resources as well as to contribute to just these types of debates about what our students population is like.
Since definitions of what constitutes a "smoker" can be subjective, here are a few measures from recent years. In 1997 we saw an increase of Dartmouth students who reported having smoked at least once in the past year. That year 49 percent of students had smoked at least once -- an increase from previous years in which usage hovered around 40 percent. At this level, once or more per year, there was no difference between men and women. About 30 percent of students had smoked more than once in the past year, and again there were no sex differences.
However, when we look at the 11 percent who told us they smoked on a daily basis (a mean of six cigarettes per day), male daily smokers smoked a bit more than female daily smokers, as the men smoked an average of seven cigarettes per day as opposed to the women's five.
An interesting aspect of cigarette smoking on campus is that of those people who defined themselves as smokers (32 percent), half only smoke when they have been drinking alcohol.
The 1998 statistics for cigarette use are still being collected via the Risk Behavior Survey on the web (www.dartmouth.edu/~evalres). This year we have also asked about the use of cigars.
