[NOTE: The author of this hypothesis -a twenty-year veteran youth worker- has agreed to allow us to post it on our site, but stipulated that we preface it with these additional comments; "I have shared the following ideas and insights with many prominent tobacco use researchers and other professionals in the public health field, but I have been reluctant to truly "go public" with this hypothesis in the past, because I did not want the principles discussed within it to be exploited by any vested interest groups on either side of the debate about smoking in our society. However, as it now appears to me that many of the "experts" are in fact determined to bury any new ideas which may happen to contradict their personal ideology or that of those who pay their bills, I have decided to share it in very public ways with any and all persons who have an interest in teen smoking and substance use initiation. - R. Gaison"]
A hypothesis. Revised February 2003
R. Gaison
gaison@canada.com
The gist of this hypothesis is;
- Substance users in segments of the population that lack full financial independence use 'balanced reciprocity' to stabilize access to a supply of their substance. This could include the majority of child and teen users as well as adult users who have not acheived financial independence (may be described as "lower income").
- The use of balanced reciprocity by such persons, for this purpose, may be a major component of the processes by which substance use is spread within these populations.
- Are there reasons to suspect, that attempts by outside agencies to disrupt users access to these substances, which succeed in destabilizing access to supply, may have inadvertently contributed significantly to the spread of substance use in those populations?
There are, I believe, some fundamentally important social dynamics involved in issues of teen smoking, teen substance use, differences in substance use rates by level of education and income, which I cannot find to have been taken into consideration, in the research and policy statements about these issues which I have encountered so far. Perhaps my own ignorance prevents me from seeing where these dynamics are in fact discussed and accounted for, or perhaps the root behaviors in these dynamics are so mundane that they have slipped "below the radar" entirely.
For example, a very basic, possibly universal, human behavior which I'm going to call Interest Sharing. By that, I mean our desire to share our interests with other persons. Most things are just more enjoyable if other people share our interest in them, and Interest Sharing appears to be something we begin practising when we are toddlers. Perhaps around the same time, we might learn that recruiting other people's interest is facilitated by generosity; if you are interested in Barbies and you want your friends to become interested in them too, it helps if you let them play with your Barbies.
There might be levels of sophistication associated with this behavior. In elementary school, more sophisticated behaviors might include those necessary to be a successful collector of things. If you are a Pokemon collector and trader, it would be more fun if lots of other kids are Pokemon collectors too, so you would just share your interest in Pokemon collecting as a matter of course. However, if you are having a difficult time finding certain cards, it would be to your advantage to recruit as many kids as possible into taking up collecting and trading. The more children there are who have traders, the greater the chance you will be able to trade for cards you need. Recruiting new collectors and traders will be facilitated if you 'invest' some of your excess cards by giving them to current non-collectors in the hope of stimulating interest in them and converting them into collector/traders. I'm going to call this more aggressive behavior, Interest Recruitment.
By the time they reach grade seven, (the beginning of what we call Junior High School, here), virtually every child will have an intuitive understanding of how the processes of Interest Sharing and Interest Recruitment work. Some will be more skilled at these behaviors than others, but only the most socially awkward and isolated are unlikely to be engaging in these behaviors, to some extent and in some manner, on a continuous basis with their peers, their friends, their family members and others in their lives. Adults engage in these behaviors all the time, also. This appears, to me, to be a universal human behavior.
What if your 'interest' happens to be, an illicit substance? Bearing in mind that for most persons under the age of eighteen in North America, tobacco and alcohol are also illicit substances. It seems likely, to me, that teens would engage in Interest Sharing, in relation to such a substance (for example, tobacco), with friends and other peers that they trust - just as they would with any other interest. That basic Interest Sharing might stimulate experimental behavior in some of their friends, and eventually lead to a small increase in the number of occasional smokers in their social circle.
Even though some teen's parents provide them with considerable amounts of spending money, and even though many teens now hold down part-time jobs while they are still in school, the majority of teens do not enjoy the kind of economic independence that working adults do. Therefore, their ability to access illicit substances like tobacco will be made more difficult by financial instability. The fact that they cannot legally buy tobacco products is likely to also interfere with the stability of their access to tobacco. So, regular users are likely to experience periods when the stability of their access to tobacco is threatened. They may respond to this instability of supply in a number of ways, the choice of which might depend on a variety of factors. One of the ways they might respond, would be to give up. They might decide that it's not worth the trouble and expense involved, and attempt to quit smoking. That is what we all hope they would choose to do, but we are talking here about human persons (notorious for our delight in finding creative ways to overcome obstacles instead of conceding defeat), and teens (notorious for their determination to "do their own thing" and rebel against the wishes and expectations of their parents and society generally).
Another way in which they might respond to the instability of their access to tobacco, would be to engage in Interest Recruitment. The more smokers they know, the greater the stability of their own access - particularly if a social obligation to supplying each other's needs is implicit in the manner in which the group is formed. This wouldn't require any new skill aquisition, for most of them. It wouldn't involve any radical, unusual or noteworthy change in their behavior toward their friends or their peers. Both they, and their friends, would initially see this as just another instance of the Interest Sharing and Interest Recruitment that they all engage in with each other, continuously. By giving out cigarettes to experimenters and occasional users, teen smokers build a circle of regular smokers with some level of committment to stabilizing each other's access to tobacco. They wouldn't necessarily need to be consciously aware that they were doing this, in order for such a strategy to be functional for them.
[One of the most consistent correlatives to a teen being a regular smoker, is having multiple friends who are smokers. This fact seems to be overwhelmingly interpreted as confirmation that 'peer pressure' is the dominant 'reason' why teens become regular smokers, ie; "All my friends smoke, so I have to smoke in order to belong". Teens themselves may perceive this to be the dynamic at work, (It's not "peer pressure" - research shows) however it is also possible that when a teen smoker reports that he/she has multiple friends who smoke, they may also be reporting that they are a member of a circle of aquaintances who were recruited into becoming smokers, by one or two of the members, as a means of stabilizing those person's own access to tobacco. The 'circle of friends who smoke' may come into being as a result of instability of supply as much or even more than as a result of 'peer pressure'.]
This is the social dynamic that many, if not most teen smokers will experience - in my observation. Experimenters have to get their first cigarettes from somewhere, and in many cases that will be other young smokers. Simple experimenters don't generate much obligation for repayment, but those who transition to being occasional smokers will start building up such an obligation. They will eventually transition to regular smokers themselves and become an obligated source of supply to those who supplied them - or they will be labelled a "mooch" and cut off by those who were supplying them. The most convenient source of supply for teen experimenters and teen occaisional smokers, will be teen regular smokers. Whether they are consciously aware of it or not, the regular smokers who "bum-out" cigarettes to experimenters and occasionals are "recruiting" new regular smokers who will in turn become a source of supply for those who "recruited" them.
This was my experience, when I was a teen smoker. I was an experimenter in grade eight. I was already an occasional pot smoker at that time. I was curious about the possible psychoactive effects of tobacco, and found that I quite enjoyed the "light-headedness" that cigarettes caused, so I transitioned to being an occasional smoker. When I was fourteen, and living with a new older step-brother, the fact that we both smoked tobacco and pot was a common ground on which to bond. He supplied me with my occasional cigarettes, and this created an informal social obligation for me to repay him at some point - which meant getting and having my own cigarettes. Eventually, this lead to my having him pick up packs of cigarettes for me, (I was still not legal), so that I could repay him and have my own supply. Having my own supply quickly lead to my becoming a regular smoker. Having my own supply also meant that I became a source of supply for him, when his access was interrupted by financial or other circumstances.
A similar social dynamic or process is described in Anthropology as balanced reciprocity; gift giving that clearly carries the obligation of an eventual and roughly equal return. Balanced reciprocity is one of the 'default' economic and social systems employed by humans. Before there were more sophisticated systems for distributing goods, there were systems of balanced reciprocity. When those sophisticated systems fail to bring us what we need, many people will resort/revert to some form of balanced reciprocity instead. Young children employ balanced reciprocity in many situations with their peers, without having to think about it - as though the use of balanced reciprocity was so fundamental a behavior as to be instinctual.
When a regular user of a substance encounters a serious threat to the stability of his/her access to a supply of the substance, they may become consciously more aggressive about employing balanced reciprocity as a means of recruiting new regular users with an obligation to help stabilize the recruiter's access to the substance. They may intentionally and aggressively sacrifice a portion of their own supply, for the purpose of 'banking' obligated repayment amongst their associates. There is no question in my mind, that balanced reciprocity is employed by teens in this manner, as I have not only observed it but also consciously engaged in it when I was a teen substance user myself.
Even after I gained legal access to tobacco at the age of 16, I had frequent problems with instability of my supply because I had little money. I was part of a group of five or six close friends who smoked, and we helped each other out whenever we could, but there were times when I could foresee that my friends were going to be in the same financial boat as me, in the near future. At such times, if I could afford to buy more than enough for my immediate needs, I would be extra generous with the experimenters and occasionals that sometimes hung around us. When the anticipated supply crisis came, I was in a position to go around demanding repayment from those I'd bummed out to, and frequently received even more in return than I'd given out myself. (Repaying more than you borrowed was/is a way of demonstrating that you will be a safe bet for repayment in the future, and may put you ahead of less safe bets in the line to receive, when smokes are being bummed out by people).
I'm certain that through this process, I personally enticed several acquaintances to transition from 'occasional' to 'regular' tobacco user - in precisely the same manner that I was enticed by my stepbrother. A slightly older friend of mine, had a very different experience as a teen smoker. He started smoking at the same age as me, but never had any problems buying cigarettes when he was underage. He had a newspaper delivery route, and rarely experienced a financial threat to his supply. He was a financially independent teen, so he didn't borrow cigarettes from others and he didn't give any out. He couldn't think of a single person that he felt responsible for encouraging them to smoke.
I have observed the same dynamics at work, in relation to many other substances, but especially in relation to highly addictive substances. I have observed this dynamic in teen users of various substances, and in adult users of illicit substances. I have observed it amongst adult smokers and drinkers who have not acheived their own financial independence. Substance users who don't have a secure supply of their substance, generate/recruit social circles of regular users that stabilize each other's supply.
It seems possible, to me, that we've all been making an enormous mistake in our approach to the problem of teen substance use, over the last forty years at least. Aggressive measures intended to disrupt teen access to a substance, which actually have the intended effect, directly promote the spread of substance use in the teen population by stimulating existing users to accelerate the use of balanced reciprocity as a means of stabilizing their supply. This dynamic could be quite explosive, as occasional users in the group transition to regular users in part so that they can honor their obligation to repayment of their sources, and find that they now have to 'recruit' aquaintances from outside the existing group as experimenters and occasionals in order to begin stabilizing their own supply. The process could go on indefinitely if the pressure on supply is great enough, but it could also slow down and eventually level off as the core regular users acheive a level of stability in their own supply sufficient to meet their comfort level.
Now, consider the dramatic increase in teen smoking rates in Canada during the period of 1991-1996. The rate rose from 21% to 30% during this time, and a cut in the federal tobacco taxes in 1994 is uniformly blamed for that dramatic increase. There are several factual problems with that idea. Most importantly - according to Stats Canada, the peak of the teen smoking increase occurred in January of 1994 (29.5%), but the legislation reducing the federal tax was not passed until February of 1994. The decrease in price may have played a role in maintaining this increase - however, there was no corresponding increase amongst the adult population. In fact, the adult smoking rates remained stable throughout this period. Even factoring in the difference in the elasticity of demand between teen and adult smokers, it makes no sense that a price decrease which increases the adult rate by less than 1%, could be solely responsible for increasing the teen rate by 50% !
What is never mentioned, in studies of this period of increased teen smoking, is that a law raising the legal age to buy tobacco products from 16 to 18 took effect in 1993. [A similar disruption to legal access was experienced by American teens at approximately the same time. All 50 states set a minimum age of at least 18 following a 1992 directive from Congress. In 1992, Congress enacted the Synar Amendment (Section 1926 of the Public Health Service Act), requiring states to enact and enforce a law prohibiting the sale of tobacco products to minors.]
Obviously, the intent of these measures was to decrease teen access to tobacco. The increased age of legal access ought to have had some mediating effect on any increase in use caused by lower prices - but seems to have had no impact whatsoever, according to studies of that period. If the increase in age of access did in fact have a braking effect on teen smoking rates, the impact of the tax decrease must have been even more dramatic than what is attributed to that factor in the studies. However, it is also possible that the increased age of legal access actually had the opposite effect on the teen smoking rate - that increased age of access in fact contributed to the increased rate of smoking.
I contend, that a modest increase in the teen smoking rate attributable to the lower price, was aggravated by the sudden addition of tens of thousands of 16 and 17 year old smokers to the pool of teen smokers who were using balanced reciprocity to assure their supply. Having lost legal access to tobacco products, thousands of teen smokers who might not have used this dynamic significantly at all, prior to this time, became reliant on this social dynamic - at the same time. Boom! The smoking rate explodes over the next few years, eventually levelling out as these thousands of users regain legal access at the age of 18. However, the rate remains at the higher level long after this, as thousands more new users were successfully recruited amongst their younger peers by this group, and of course those younger users continue to exploit the process when they are 16-17 - while only four years prior to this, many of them would not have needed to resort to using balanced reciprocity to assure their access to supply.
It seems not only possible, but very likely, to me, that the spread of substance use of all kinds - within the segments of the population I have been referring to - over the past 40 years or so, has tragically and ironically been accelerated by the very measures which were intended to interfere with access to supply of those substances within those populations.