News and Events

Gilchrist County Students Working Against Tobacco (SWAT) Club Addresses the Issue of Flavored Tobacco
By Cheyenne Siegel, SWAT 4-H member and Gilchrist 4-H County Council President

Our SWAT club feels that flavored tobacco use by youth is a big problem in Gilchrist County and we wanted to take action in changing this.

Based on the 2012 Florida Youth Tobacco Survey, in Gilchrist county 32% of all high school students have tried flavored cigars, and 14.4% of all high school students in Gilchrist County are regular flavored cigar smokers.

Flavored Cigars

In Bell and Trenton there are tobacco retailers less than 1,000 feet from schools, which we believe is a contributor to the amount of youth smoking flavored tobacco.

In order to make a change about this we made a resolution to present to our local leaders which urges all retailers to stop selling flavored tobacco to make it less accessible to underage youth. We believed that passing this resolution will help to change the social norms about selling flavored tobacco, and it will influence retailers and people in the area to understand that it is not okay to market tobacco products to young people. 

On March 10th our SWAT club spoke at the Trenton City Commission meeting to talk to the City Commissioners about the flavored tobacco resolution. We are happy that they unanimously passed the resolution.

Between working on this flavored tobacco resolution and having Kick Butts Day events at our local fair and at Trenton High School we hope to inform more youth about the dangers of tobacco use and how tobacco companies market products to them.