The effects of tobacco advertising on children

The London Based Children's Research Unit (CRU) has investigated juvenile smoking initiation and advertising in 15 countries. Each country investigated differed with respect to tobacco advertising restrictions, ranging from Norway, which has had a long-term ban on all advertising of tobacco products, to Hong Kong and Japan, which had few advertising restrictions at the time of the research. Advertising was not found to significantly influence juvenile smoking initiation and it was also found to be a poor predictor of juvenile smoking prevalence. That is, countries with tobacco advertising did not have a higher level of juvenile smoking prevalence than countries without advertising.