Adults aren’t the only ones who want to keep kids from smoking. At a Great American Smokeout press conference in November, Chantel Nolan, a sophomore at Enosburg Falls High School, stood in front of a crowd of students, teachers and health department officials at South Burlington’s Doubletree Hotel and declared that she and her peers were “taking a stand” against Big Tobacco. Nolan is a member of Our Voicesxposed, a youth-led education and activism effort funded by the Vermont Department of Health. She and 17 other OVX teens were wearing identical white masks — on cue, the group fell to the ground, pretending to be dead. The kids were standing in for the 800 Vermonters who die every year from smoking-related illnesses. In addition to staging the mock die-in for the press, OVX members organize campaigns such as last year’s postcard drive targeting Hannaford over its kids’-eye-view placement of tobacco ads. They also spread the word at their schools about the perils of smoking. That’s the right kind of peer pressure.
Our Voicesxposed: Find out how to join one of Vermont’s 16 OVX groups at ovx.org.
This article was originally published in Seven Days’ monthly parenting magazine, Kids VT.
This article appears in Kids VT, December 2012-January 2013.
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