Creating the socially marginalised youth smoker: the role of tobacco control

Abstract

We discuss how the tobacco control discourse on youth smoking in Canada appears to be producing and constituting socially marginalised smokers. We analyse material from a study on social inequalities in Canadian youth smoking. Individual interviews were conducted in 2007 and 2008 with tobacco control practitioners specialising in youth smoking prevention in British Columbia and Quebec. We found that the discourse on youth smoking is creating a set of divisive practices, separating youths who have a capacity for self-control from those who do not, youths who are able to make responsible decisions from those who are not - with these distinctions often framed as a function of social class. Youths who smoke were not described simply as persons who smoke cigarettes but as individuals who, through their economic and social marginalisation, are biologically fated and behaviourally inclined to be smokers. This 'smokers' risk' discourse obscures the social structural conditions under which people smoke and reproduces the biological and behavioural reductionism of biomedicine. The collision of risk and class in the discourse on poor youth who smoke may not only be doubly burdening but may intensify social inequalities in youth smoking by forming subcultures of resistance and risk-taking.