ATLANTA – Cigarette smoking among high school students dropped to 11% in 2015, the lowest level since the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) began tracking usage in 1991, according to results released late last week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Cigarette use decreased significantly from 28% in 1991 to 11% in 2015, according to the report. It also tracked the use of electronic vapor products, including e-cigarettes, and found that 24% of high school students reported using e-cigarettes during the past 30 days.

Overall, the U.S. adult smoking rate fell to 15% last year, the largest single-year drop since 1993.

In 2014, NACS issued a statement of position that encouraged stores selling e-cigarettes to adopt, as a best practice, a policy of treating these products as age restricted and subjecting them to the same age-verification procedures as those applicable to tobacco products.

NACS also was a founding member of the pioneering We Card program that was launched in 1995 to help introduce the concept of responsible retailing on a massive scale. Today, convenience stores verify identifications for age-restricted products 4.5 million times a day—almost triple the 1.8 million IDs verified by TSA on a daily basis. The We Card program has provided retailers with more than one million in-store educational kits and has trained more than 375,000 retail employees nationwide.