Date: September 9, 2010
To: English 1311 Students
From: Anthony Duong
RE: Smoke Free Paso Del Norte /Live Outside The Pack
There are times when you walk down the street and find a group of teenagers with cigarettes in their hands. You wonder “how can these teens be doing something like this so early in their youth or even at all?” In truth, teenagers start smoking because they see their older siblings do it, or because their friends are exposed to the use of tobacco. This problem among the youth is increasing to unbelievable percentages. In order to combat this problem in the El Paso community, Paso Del Norte Heath Foundation started an initiation appropriately named A Smoke Free Paso de Norte. The initiations goal is to have a coordinated approach to reducing tobacco use in the region. They plan to achieve this goal by:
• Starting initiatives with the youth to stop tobacco use and to prevent pregnant women and children from the harmful effects of second hand smoke.
• Using media and counter marketing campaigns with an emphasis on the youth and the quit ling to stop smoking among the youth, young adults, and adults
• Cleaning the air around in the regions, educating the population of the tobacco laws of Texas.
Plans for reaching the goal don’t arrive out of thin air. Employees of the initiation, as well as the foundation, work to make documents to reach such a large-scale goal. Employees would include members of the foundation and even local people who volunteer their time to the initiation. Our own UTEP Department of Psychology staff, Dr. Ted Cooper and Nora Hernandez are part of this initiation. Dr. Cooper is the principle investigator of the initiation and Nora Hernandez is the program coordinator. Here students can volunteer their time to help spread awareness of the problem with tobacco. Organizations with such a wide spread around the community, such as this one, can connect to other agencies to further their goal. A Smoke Free Paso Del Norte has connections to agencies such as Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids and Texas Youth Tobacco Control Program. These agencies work together to reach a smoke free community.
In order to reach their goal, A Smoke Free Paso Del Norte created a campaign called Live Outside The Pack. They use this campaign to spread awareness through commercials, banners, web pages, and through novelty merchandise. Live Outside The Pack also allows the community to participate in the campaign by posting videos, pictures, and comments on the webpage and their Myspace page. Here everyone who visits the web pages will be able to view and understand the concept of the posts. The campaign also makes commercials to convey their message to the community. Even their very logo represents their goal. The logo is a crossed out cigarette bud suggesting not to smoke. Other pictures from the agency would include a young boy attached to strings and hanging. This message says that tobacco can control you. The layout of the web pages is simple and easy to navigate. Allowing the community to go through the page and understand the information that is given. Similarly both the banners and use of language within this agency are informative but it is easily understandable for the youth. This also applies to the video commercials. This is because their peers and other young people are posting the information.
To further spread the awareness to stop the use of tobacco, they put small messages onto merchandise such as shirts and balls. Short messages that say no to tobacco such as “I’ll pass.” Through the use of merchandise people will read messages off shirts and thus take into consideration the affects of tobacco. The commercials bring awareness by a broadcast display of visual and oral communication. Radio transmissions while driving are also used to spread awareness. As a result of the agencies efforts the only 18 percent of adults smoked cigarettes in 2003, a 5 percent drop from the 23 percent in 1996.
As effective as this may seem, there is still much to be done. The youth of the community is still exposed to tobacco, whether in small doses or in large. Spreading the word is the best way to prevent this. Be involved with the agency, “all you have to do is spread the word.” As you continue to walk down the street, one of the teens ask you if you want to smoke. You look at him straight in the eye and respond “I’ll pass.”
