Join TAP and find out how to really Quit!

The TAP program is designed for students already smoking. TAP is an eight-session program that provides information, opportunities for self-assessment, and challenging weekly assignments to help participants quit smoking. The TAP curriculum encourages each person to choose the methods of quitting that will work best for the individual. The goals are awareness of short and long term effects of tobacco, identify personal best ways to quit using, providing a wide range of quitting methods, refusal skills, and providing a supportive environment to quit. Peer leaders will continue to follow up with participants on a weekly basis following completion of the curriculum.

Quick Summary

Tobacco Prevention Program
For Students
The Minnesota Smoking Prevention Program addresses the prevention of tobacco use by influencing the social and psychological factors that encourage the onset of smoking cigarettes or using smokeless tobacco. This six-session classroom curriculum includes a review of the major social influences that encourages and support tobacco use among youth. These important initiating factors include peer pressure, advertising, and a lack of behavioral skills with which to resist these influences.

This program is specifically designed to help adolescents
1. Identify reasons why people start using tobacco.

2. Discover that non-use of tobacco is normative behavior.

3. Practice skills for resisting peer pressure to use tobacco.

4. Recognize the covert messages in tobacco advertising.

5. Decide their own personal reasons for not using tobacco.

The basics:
·The average age of first tobacco use is now 11-15 (CDC. 1994)

·Among smokers aged 12-17 years, 70% already regret their decision to smoke and 66% say they want to quit (The George Gallup Int'l Institute, 1992)

·Everyday, 3,000 young people become regular smokers (Pierce, J. JAMA. 1989)

·More than 3 million American adolescents currently smoke and more than 1 million adolescents use spit tobacco (CDC 1994)

Did you know that:

·Every 13 seconds, someone dies from tobacco use.

·Second hand smoke kills some 50,000 Americans each year, making it the third leading cause of death.(AHA & ACS)

·33% of young people who become regular smokers will die of a smoking related death (CDC, Prevention Works)

·Lung cancer has surpassed breast cancer as the leading killer among women. (ACS & AHA)

·Cigar smoking causes cancer of the throat, mouth and lungs.

·Cigarette smoke contains over 3,000 chemicals including:

·Acetone (nail polish remover)

·Hydrogen cyanide (rat poison)

·Nicotine (cockroach killer)

·Hydrazine (rocket fuel)

·Formaldehyde (embalming fluid) Wait there's still more!

·Smoking causes more death every year than fires, auto crashes, AIDS, alcohol, cocaine, heroin, murders and suicides combined.

·Younger or less confident children may be less likely to attempt to purchase tobacco if they must request it from a clerk. (Institute of Medicine, 1994)

·Spit and chewing tobacco, light cigarettes, cigars and pipe tobacco are NOT safe alternatives to regular cigarettes.

·Women appear to be more susceptible to the addictive properties of nicotine and have a slower metabolic clearance of nicotine from their bodies. (NHI Survey 91-92)

·On average, someone who smokes a pack or more a day of cigarettes lives 6.6 years less than someone who never smokes regularly. (CDC, Prevention Works)

Fact: Of the 3,000 young people that start smoking each day on the U.S. 2,000 of them are young women!