A tobacco and alcohol use profile of San Francisco's Chinese community

Relatively little is known about Asian American tobacco and alcohol use pat terns. This is particularly true of Chinese living in the United States-eit her U.S.-born or non-U.S.-born Chinese. This article presents data from a r esearch project studying tobacco and alcohol use patterns in San Francisco' s Chinese community. Data were secured both from focus groups and a self-re port telephone survey of a random sample of 1,808 Chinese residents in San Francisco. This results indicate that the prevalence of both tobacco and al cohol use is lower for San Francisco's Chinese population than for the gene ral population. Moreover, those persons who report smoking tend to be diffe rent from those who report consuming alcohol. The study concludes that spec ific, culturally relevant tobacco and alcohol prevention programs should be designed to better reach this target population.