I finally blogged on this because, as I suspected, this article just happened to have been produced 5 days after an article about Pfizer's and Bayer's recent release of a new PR campaign designed increase market share, including changing their image, in part to get the attention of younger men. The companies have seen, uh, flagging sales so they are in a dead horse... I mean ... heat and looking for more market share.
And Carl, I think there's a fairly high rate of smoking among college students. Probably not nearly as much as in the 60s, but I'll bet it's close to the 30% overall rate in the US (those were the numbers last I read which was back in the late 90s). Also, the use of chewing tobacco seems to be growing from my observation. I was kind of shocked to learn this from my son who said that a lot of the girls he know use chew. They want the buzz without the smoke. Also, there's the increased use of cigars and blunts.
Wasn't there something on the backlash, which started with grunge in the early 90s? (I looked it up and there was a 28% increase in smoking among college students between 1993 and 1997) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=10927777
(I find it hard to believe that kids have damaged themselves that much that they have ED. And, at any rate, I doubt there's an epidemic and that there is, rather, a manufactured interest in the issue spurred by the PR spin machines of the pharmaceutical companies.
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