02/18/2003

By ROBERT MAK / KING 5 News

MATLOCK, Wash. - It’s easy to drive through Matlock and not realize it that the community is so small there's just one school. Each grade has just about 20 students.

Tuesday, the kids of Matlock had two unusual visitors - two young guys who pulled up in a Hummer. Mike Zager and Wyatt Hataway came to tell the kids about the evils of tobacco.

It's called the Tobacco Smokes You Hummer Road Tour, and the idea is to attract attention with a cool Humvee, then tell kids it's not cool to smoke.

KING The Hummer is meant to make an impression on the kids.

It sounds like a perfectly worthwhile idea, but the cost might catch your attention, too.

The tour lasts just 16 weeks, and for this the state is paying $369,000.

Think about it. You could buy a Hummer for about $70,000 and still have more than $250,000 left over to hire two kids to drive around.

If the state is spending $369,000, where's the money going?

The two young guys driving around in the Hummer say they're not the ones making a lot of money here. The program is organized by a company out of Florida.

"There are people in the business of making a profit off of this, as there are in every kind of business," says Terry Reid of the Washington Department of Health.

Does Reid feel comfortable letting them make this kind of profit on this program?

"The way we test that, is we look at the cost of this, and gauge it against what it costs us to buy billboard space, television ads and so forth, and when we do the math, it looks very cost-effective," says Reid.

Resource Links

UnfilteredTV.com Hummer Tour schedule

The Department of Health says the Hummer tour is reaching students in rural areas.

On this day each class comes in, gets a 10-minute anti-tobacco speech, and then the kids were invited to spend another 20 minutes playing regular video games.

If you do the math, the state is paying $3,800 for each stop. So on this visit, that works out to about $16 for each kid.

"We've got hip young guys, 22-, 24-years-old, who are out there, who sort of look like they just rode in on their skateboard, who are talking to these kids, and the kids are listening to them," says Reid.

But are there cheaper ways to reach students?

The health department also runs a program with the American Lung Association called TATU, the Teens Against Tobacco Use program.

KING If a cool dude says "don't smoke," it more likely carries weight with kids.

Last year more than 1,000 high schoolers talked with 30,000 elementary students.

The program costs $70,000 less than the Hummer tour, but the state says TATU has its limitations.

"There are going to be some kids who that does not faze, because often times the TATU kids look like good kids, and the Hummer guys look like skateboard guys," says Reid.

So back to the question: $369,000 for two skateboard guys?

One expert on teen smoking says it's a reasonable gamble, though not yet a proven formula.

"The use of a Humvee to get kids to not start using tobacco, by itself, has not really been studied," says Dr. Robert Jaffe.

The state says it will do surveys to evaluate how effective the Hummer tour really is. But it hasn't given any thought to buying its own Hummer to save money.

"We hadn't considered that option. But one thing we know is that the road tour, the reason the road tour is effective, is because it's fresh, it's different, it's innovative. If we did it every year, it would wear out and get stale. And we'd have a Hummer that we wouldn't have much use for," says Reid.

Nine other states have had similar tours. KING 5 talked with several anti-smoking experts who agree with Dr. Jaffe that the idea of having kids talk with kids is a sound concept.

But should it cost $369,000? The state points out that for the money the Florida company is also handing out anti-smoking literature to the kids and scheduling the school appearances.