News and Events
Join Us as We Celebrate Take Down Tobacco, A National Day of Action
March 17, 2021
For years, The Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids has hosted Kick Butts Day, nationally recognized tobacco prevention holiday. In an effort to expand its prevention efforts into the growing list of electronic tobacco products such as e-cigarettes and other vaping device, Kick Butts Day has been rebranded as Take Down Tobacco.
The holiday will be celebrated on April 1 this year, here in Gilchrist and throughout the country. This holiday has been celebrated for a quarter century starting back in 1996 and over this time-period the U.S has made remarkable progress in doing just what it set out to do, lower youth smoking rates.
Though kicking the cigarette butts out of youth lives has shown huge improvement within Gilchrist county, the newest battle we face is the adolescent use of e-cigarettes . With our local use youth of electronic vaping devices going from 4.9% to 25% over the last 6 years, this skyrocketing new trend it is beginning to reverse the progress we have achieved these past 25 years.
With this is mind this year we plan to celebrate the annual holiday by encouraging our Students Working Against Tobacco (SWAT) students and other youth ambassadors to stand up and speak out against the big tobacco industry. By changing the focus on actual cigarettes towards the newest threat, electronic cigarettes, and by giving our youth a platform that empowers them to stand up for what they believe is right, we not only hear their opinions on the matter but may also hear clever solutions on how to start to fix the problem before it continues escalating.
For more information on our local Take Down Tobacco events, of for more information on our local SWAT program, contact Dan Murray at dmurray@quitdoc.com.
