Black, Hispanic Youth Smoking on Rise

Tobacco use by adolescents from racial and ethnic minorities has been increasing at a much greater rate than it has among white adolescents, says a U.S. surgeon general's report released last week.

Minority teenagers are still smoking at considerably lower rates than white teenagers. But cigarette-smoking rates rose among African-American and Hispanic adolescents in the 1990s after several years of decline.

From 1991 to 1997, the smoking rate for high school students overall climbed by one-third, according to the report. During the same period, however, cigarette smoking among black teenagers jumped 80...