Do sources of cigarettes among adolescents vary by age over time?

Previous research shows that the proportion of adolescent smokers who purchase their cigarettes from stores declined in the 1990s and early 2000s while the proportion who obtain cigarettes from social sources such as friends and family increased. In this study, we expand on those findings by assessing how the sources of cigarettes used by adolescents vary by age over time, from 2000 to 2006. Data are from the Minnesota Adolescent Community Cohort study and include 1,259 adolescent past-month smokers who were surveyed every six months via telephone. We measured the use of five types of cigarette sources—four social (from another teen, from an adult, paid someone else to buy, or stole) and one commercial (bought from a store). We conducted generalized mixed models to assess probabilities of use of each source for each age separately (ages 14-17) over time (controlling for gender, number of close friends who smoke, whether someone in household smokes, and number of days smoked in last 30 days). Results differ by type of cigarette source, with “obtaining cigarettes from other teens” being by far the most common source for all four ages across all time points. The probability of buying cigarettes from a store decreased over time for all ages, while the probability of stealing cigarettes from others, although not a common source, increased for 14- and 15-year-olds but not 16- and 17-year-olds. Many additional results, including differences between males and females, and implications for interventions will be discussed.