or--education, punishment, financial incentives, and treatment, with the latter being often the last resort. All work some of the time and none work all of the time. In all four cases, programs for the very young have the best results.
Yet this is not always the case. Tobacco smoking has been known to cause cancer and other health problems for some time now, and yet as Pierce, Lee, and Gilpin (1994) note, the incidence of smoking among adolescents (in the case of this study, adolescent girls) continues to be a problem. Rates may have decreased from peak periods in the 1960s and early 1970s, but it is still true that thousands of adolescents each year are ignoring dangers to their health as they start smoking. Pierce, Lee, and Gilpin (1994) found that one reason for this is advertising targeted at young women and young people in general, and any program of education to reduce the incidence of smoking is competing with this other social force. The belief that advertising is a major force in causing a certain behavior becomes a rationale for using advertising to counter that same behavior.
The regulation of risk has been applied to a large number of environmental hazards and other perceived hazards in the home and the workplace, with varying results. Both the government and the people have shown considerable interest in having the government serve as watchdog over certain specific hazards, and probably no perceived hazard has been addressed so assiduously or with such success as smoking. American society has changed over the last three decades from a society accepting of smoking to a society tolerant of smoking to a society antagonistic to smoking and openly intolerant of it. This process has also entailed a change in emphasis, from smoking contributes to a variety of health problems to smoking is hazardous to your health to smoking is hazardous to the health of those around you. The government started the process of c...