In a Statehouse hearing room festooned with signs promoting "Kick Butts Day," the Legislature's joint Health Care Committee yesterday approved a bill submitted by a Northbridge High School senior to restrict smoking at indoor flea markets. ...

A group of American Indians is holding a weekend-long gathering in Wakulla County to help stamp out youth smoking. The event, sponsored by a recently formed organization called Native Americans Stopping Tobacco in Youth, or NASTY, began Friday and continues from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. today. ...

Find it tougher than others to kick habit Adolescents can become addicted to cigarettes in as little as a few weeks by taking just a few draws on a cigarette every other day, according to new research from the University of Massachusetts that demonstrates how quickly nicotine cravings can foster a life-threatening habit. ...

MARIETTA, OHIO (AP) -- Authorities are beginning to crack down on teen-agers violating a new Ohio law that bans tobacco use for anyone under 18. ...

Prenatal exposure to nicotine inflicts lasting damage that might leave the brain vulnerable to further injury and addiction upon later use of the drug, according to animal research conducted by Duke University Medical Center pharmacologists. The team found in rat studies that exposure to nicotine in fetal development alters the brain structures and brain cell activity in regions critical to learning, memory and reward. ...

Jeff Koltys is 13 years old and in the seventh grade at the Mary E. Volz Middle School in Runnemede, N.J., a blue-collar suburb outside Philadelphia. On a recent Wednesday morning he describes as typical, Jeff arrives at his 9: 30 class, a "gifted and talented" program reserved for the school's brightest students, and sits down at a computer. He will spend the rest of the period in front of the screen, working with a desktop-publishing program to superimpose a photograph of a cigarette over a photograph of a tank. When Jeff is done with the project, which he says will likely take several class periods to complete, there will be a Winston filter tip where the tank's gun barrel once was. As Jeff explains, the image he is creating has a simple message: "Smoking kills." ...

BEING A PARENT is hard work, and you need to stay healthy for the long haul. From the time you are eating for two, through the sleepless nights of infancy and into the combat zone of adolescence, being a parent is as much about physical endurance as it is about enduring love. But there is another reason for you to live as though you are in training for a road race -- your kids are watching. ...

Diminished production of dendritic cell interleukin 10 (IL-10), an anti-inflammatory cytokine previously associated with asthma, is linked to environmental tobacco smoke during infancy in a study published this month in Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology , the scientific journal of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI). ...

The illusion of smoking can be just as deadly as the real thing for minority inner-city girls who believe their mothers have the habit, a new University of Florida study finds. Black and Hispanic inner-city girls who think their mothers smoke - even if that is not the case - were three times more likely to have tried cigarettes than girls who know their mothers are non-smokers, said Julia Graber, a UF psychology professor who did the research with seventh-grade girls. The study appears in the current issue of the Journal of Research on Adolescence. ...

SOME schools have started using smoke-detection machines called smokerlysers to smoke out students who steal a few drags in school. At Greenridge Secondary, it is routine for students to be asked to blow hard into the machine, to check if they have smoked in the last 12 hours. Persuasion rather than punishment is used to dissuade those who have. First, they are counselled by a teacher but, if they still persist, they are sent to a smoking-cessation clinic. ...