By Travis Gettys
The Cincinnati Enquirer

INDEPENDENCE - The "No Smoking" sign on the door might have been redundant.

More than 30 seventh- and eighth-graders took part Saturday in a three-on-three basketball tournament as part of Kick Butts Day, a nationwide effort to educate young people about the dangers of smoking.

Data from 2002 show that 34 percent of Kentucky high school students and 15 percent of middle-schoolers are smokers.

"It's pretty ridiculous how prevalent youth tobacco use is," said John Mains, a volunteer with Coalition of Minors Battling Against Tobacco.

Mains, a senior at Simon Kenton High School, helped organize the event at Hickory Grove Baptist Church with the Northern Kentucky Independent District Health Department.

Teams had such names as Methane, Arsenic and Vinyl Chloride, named after harmful chemicals found in cigarettes, and students received a lesson in their dangers.

Mains told the students that tobacco's active ingredient, nicotine, is also a powerful insecticide.

"It's so strong that if a human drank one cup of it they'd die," Mains said.

Participants also received lessons in other aspects of a healthful lifestyle from nutritional information.

Each student left the event with an anti-smoking T-shirt and a Kick Butts backpack, and tournament champions received a $25 gift certificate to a sporting goods store.

"We had just hoped this day would help get the message out to the younger students," Mains said. "Between middle and high school there's a huge jump in tobacco use."

Youth tobacco use has dropped in recent years, said Stephanie Vogel, a health education manager with Northern Kentucky Independent District Health Department.

"Most of it is due to the increase in price," she said. "We'd like to say it's just from our efforts, but there's a lot of factors."

E-mail tgettys@enquirer.com