It’s official: smoking is no longer seen as ‘cool’ among adolescents. Teenagers are turning away from the dreaded weed in their droves, with the numbers who admit to ‘currently smoking’ down from 12 per cent in 2010 to eight per cent in 2014.
Despite the fact that it is illegal to sell cigarettes to anyone under the age of 18 however, 30 per cent of young people aged between 12 and 17 said it would be easy to purchase cigarettes if they wanted to, while 59 per cent of children said they would be able to find someone else to make the purchase for them.
The statistics were revealed within the Health Behaviours in School Children survey 2014, which involved children aged between 10 and 17.
Twenty seven per cent of those aged between 15 and 17 said they had had sex, more of them boys than girls (31 per cent compared to 21 per cent).
Of those, 33 per cent of those using the contraceptive pill and 73 per cent used condoms.
