More Teens Are Smoking, And It Seems No One Can Stop Them.

Tim Woldt spent his lunch hour this week huddled under a tree across the street from Roosevelt High School, his shoulders hunched against the dripping rain and his right hand cupped to protect his noontime smoke.

The 16-year-old took a drag, then laughed out a puff of gray smoke when asked if he plans to quit.

"I'm trying to cut back, but there's no way in hell, as long as I go to school," the sophomore said. "All my friends smoke, so I won't quit until I get away from them."

Woldt, who says he's been smoking since seventh grade, has plenty of company. At high schools everywhere, the numbers of students filing outside, rain or shine, to satiate their nicotine appetites is on the rise.

Recent studies show the numbers of teens firing up Marlboros, Camels, Salems, Kools and the countless other brands is up, despite ever-escalating efforts by government enforcers and public-health campaigners.

Last week, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that more than 36 percent of American high-school students smoke, up about 1 percent since 1995. More alarming, smoking has doubled among African-American teen boys.

The new numbers are scary to parents and public-health workers because studies find most adult smokers get hooked before they turn 18.

For decades, grown-ups have been drilling kids on the dangers of smoking, yet they do it anyway. Now officials hope action will work where words haven't. Local schools are planning severe anti-smoking policies. The county is successfully cracking down on stores that sell smokes to kids. And now the state has banned tobacco possession by anyone under 18. But there's still no way to know if even those extreme steps will be enough to overcome the forces that allow nicotine addiction to inhale teens.

"You tell the kids no, and they're still going to do it," said Elise Lindborg of Seattle's Project ASSIST, a 17-state study of smoking intervention. "It's hard for them to see 20 years down the road. The gross pictures don't do anything."

The teens agree.

"Everyone who smokes knows it's bad for you," said Erin, a 16-year-old sophomore in a Tommy Hilfiger T-shirt who puffed on a Marlboro Light under an umbrella before the morning bell at Roosevelt. "But you start doing it more, and you start buying packs, and pretty soon you're addicted."

Tough anti-smoking campaigns, meanwhile, have failed to deter the strong rebellion factor.

"Part of it is they want to be grown up," said Lisa Bond, region six director of the Washington State Parent-Teacher Association. "Or they know it bugs grown-ups. You can only pierce so many parts of your body."

There doesn't seem to be a stereotype for high-school smokers anymore. It's no longer a habit exclusive to leather-jacketed, lip-ringed toughs or long-haired stoner kids with black rock-band shirts and hiccuping muscle cars. If it ever was.

As Woldt finished his first lunchtime cigarette, his friend, a 16-year-old Roosevelt junior in a rain-soaked jacket, pointed his vaporizing Newport menthol at a gold, mag-wheeled BMW full of flaxen-haired girls in stylish clothes.

"All those girls in that car smoke, man," Woldt's school chum said. "It gives them a reason to think that they fit in, I guess."

Meantime, school districts consistently ban smoking from school grounds. So students end up across the street - their discarded butts and potentially intimidating presence sometimes angering neighbors or business owners.

Some schools have responded by creating "unofficial" smoking zones at the edge of campuses, to help calm neighbors and keep students within earshot of school bells.

"That always rubs people the wrong way," said Bond. Then again, she's not a fan of allowing students to smoke at all, anywhere.

But will prohibition do any good?

The state's new tobacco-possession law, which takes effect June 12, will impose a $50 fine on anyone under 18 found with tobacco products, whether they're using them or not. "That means the end of smoking areas in schools," Bond said.

In Seattle, officials are discussing changing district policy to include possession as a disciplinary violation and to increase the no-smoking zone to within 1,000 feet of district property.

"That's pretty far," says Celia Arriaga of the Seattle School District's comprehensive health department, who helped write the changes. "We want to make it more difficult for kids to go out and smoke. Hopefully that would send more of a message."

Predictably, the teens said fines and other school crackdowns won't work.

"That will just make them skip school to go smoke, and that will make it worse," Erin said as she smoked on the Roosevelt front steps with a friend. They acknowledged they "could get suspended" for failing to walk another 30 feet to stand off campus. But they said enforcement isn't very tight.

But enforcement has been tough on King County retailers, who are becoming increasingly compliant in halting tobacco sales to kids.

The county's tobacco-prevention program conducts about 2,000 "checks" on retailers a year. In 1989, 66 percent of the stores were found selling smokes to minors. Last year, only 5 percent were.

But parents, and other adults - whom prevention officials call "adult enablers" - are a different story.

"Almost every week we get a call from a 7-Eleven or a Safeway telling us that kids are hounding their customers, or paying them $5, to buy them cigarettes," said Greg Hewett, the county prevention program's supervisor. Angry calls came from parents, too: "They were saying, `You've cracked down, and now we have to go buy cigarettes for them,' " he said.

Woldt's mother, Alice Woldt, sighed with exasperation at her son's smoking. She said she understands parents who give up fighting it.

"He started smoking without us knowing it," she said. "And there's no way I can stop him. He realizes it's a health problem, but he's hooked."

Woldt agrees with his mother.

"Once you get addicted, it's like, `What are you going to do, Mom?' " he said. "Not a thing."

Sensing that teenage rebellion, one strategy has been to educate students about how tobacco advertising targets them, to light up their ire about being manipulated.

But the teens scoffed at the suggestion that they are hapless victims. None of them said they were charmed to smoke by the happy, energetic smokers on the backs of magazines or the likes of smooth Joe Camel or the rugged Marlboro Man.

"I don't want to be a cowboy," snorted one Roosevelt smoker. "I smoke because I like to smoke. And I'm addicted."

Ian Ith's e-mail address is iith@seattletimes.com

Marc Ramirez's e-mail address is mram-new@seatimes.com