Bahk Eun-ji has been with The Korea Times since 2012, building a career across multiple desks. She began at the Business Desk, where she conducted in-depth interviews with key figures in Korea's corporate world. Later, she moved to the Politics & City Desk, focusing on education policy and social affairs. She later served as team leader of the digital content team, leading curation efforts on the newspaper’s homepage and reshaping print stories for social media audiences to enhance digital reach. Now back on the Politics Desk, she covers the National Assembly and the Ministry of National Defense, with a renewed focus on political developments.
Underage smoking, drinking rates lower amid pandemic
By Bahk Eun-ji
The number of underage smokers and drinkers in Korea dropped significantly last year compared to the previous year, recent data from the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) showed.
Cigarettes on display at a convenience store in Seoul in this Jan. 4, 2018 photo. Yonhap
By Bahk Eun-ji
The KDCA suggests this was a result of the decreased number of days where children attend school and reduced activities with peers amid the COVID-19 outbreak.
According to KDCA data, the incidence of middle and high schoolers who had smoked stood at 4.4 percent last year, down from 6.7 percent a year earlier, and it was the lowest since the data was first collected and released in 2005.
The figures represent the percentage of students who smoked at least one cigarette in the 30 days prior to the survey. The KDCA surveyed 54,948 students from 800 middle and high schools nationwide.
By gender among all survey participants, the smoking rate among male students was 6 percent, down from 9.3 percent a year before, and that of female students stood at 2.7 percent, down from 3.8 percent in 2019.
The underage drinking rate was also the lowest ever. When asked if they had consumed alcohol at least once during the last 30 days, 10.7 percent of the students said they had, a decline from 15 percent the previous year.
The survey found that 12.1 percent of boys consumed alcohol, down from 16.9 percent in 2019, while 9.1 percent of girls consumed alcohol, down from 13.0 percent over the same period.
The KDCA says these figures were attributable to the decreased number of days when students attended school and met peers offline last year, as schools and cram schools repeatedly opened and shut down in accordance with the government's social distancing rules.
“For teenagers, friends or peers smoking has the largest influence on their own smoking habits. We believe online classes and the resultant changes in interactions with peers have reduced that influence,” an official of the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education (SMOE) said.
The SMOE said it will expand anti-smoking campaigns to prevent the lowered smoking rate from increasing again, by developing anti-smoking programs especially to prevent the use of e-cigarettes.