Montana youth take their tobacco free message to college

Riley Mortenson is a recipient of the Montana Tobacco Use Prevention $5,000 Collegiate Scholarship. Riley has been a member of reACT, (from 2012-2016) which is Montana’s teen-led movement against Big Tobacco. reACT joins statewide youth empowerment movements across the country in recognizing the power of young people to effectively take on the leading cause of preventable death: commercial tobacco use.

In her hometown of Malta, Riley has become an active agent of change. Some of the highlights of her years in reACT were putting “Coordinating Red Ribbon Week activities, Held Friday night Alive, once or twice a month” and participating in “Mini Summits with other reACT clubs along the Hi-Line.”

Riley has seen how Montana’s Clean Indoor Air Act (CIAA) has affected her and her family. “Since I live in a small town, kids under 21 are able to go into bars and eat. With the implementa-tion of the CIAA, I don’t have to worry about going into a bar and having an allergy attack be-cause of the smoke in the room. Along with that, one of my best friend’s mom use to smoke…when CIAA was implemented, I feel it encouraged her to stop smoking and turn her health around.”

As a leader she sees e-cigarettes as one of the biggest issues in her peer crowd. “Since the boom of e-cigarettes, I have noticed that more and more teens are using them. At the beginning of 2014-2015 school year, kids in my schools were sneaking them into classrooms and using them there. The School Board, Superintendent, and High School Principal had to make adjustments to the school handbook prohibiting the use of ecigs on school grounds.”

Riley has plans to attend Montana State University- Northern this fall. In July of 2016 MSU-Northern joined 11 other collegiate campuses in Montana in adopting a tobacco free campus policy which provide a safe and healthy environment free from tobacco use for its students, employees and visitors. She hopes to pursue a double major in Secondary Education with a math emphasis and Business Administration, with a minor in Accounting and Associates in Agriculture Technologies. She hopes to join the Tobacco Free Task force at MSU-Northern and bring awareness to campus students and assist in the newly implemented 100% tobacco free campus.