DISPARITIES IN TOBACCO USE FOUND\U.S. study also reports smoking cost to states.

Byline: Barnaby J. Feder The New York Times

The first state-by-state profile of the nation's tobacco use, the huge economic penalty it exacts and the various state tobacco-control laws was released Thursday by the federal government, highlighting startling disparities.

The report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta showed adult smoking rates varying from slightly more than 15 percent of the population in Utah to more than 30 percent in neighboring Nevada. Deaths related to smoking followed a similar but not identical pattern, although Nevada again ranked first, with a death rate more than twice that of Utah's.

Other parts of the report noted how far each state was from meeting national goals for reducing smoking by the year 2000, big differences in the percentages of teen-agers smoking, and medical costs ranging from nearly $4 billion annually in California to less than $100 million in less populous states.

The report was hailed by anti-tobacco groups as more proof of the need for strict national regulations recently proposed by the Food and Drug Administration. It was dismissed by the tobacco industry as old news.

The government itself said that the comparisons might stimulate changes in some states but that the report was not part of any particular policy drive.

"This is a snapshot, not an evaluation of what reduces tobacco use and what doesn't," said Michael P. Eriksen, director of the Office on Smoking and Health at the centers, a federal agency whose headquarters are in Atlanta. "There's no analysis, no recommendations, no conclusions."

The data most likely to attract attention related to smoking among high-school-age students because underage smokers are the target of the proposed FDA rules.

The figures, which date from 1993, show West Virginia facing the biggest problems - just under 39 percent of its students in the ninth through the 12th grade reported smoking within the month in which they were surveyed.

Only 16.7 percent of the high-school-age children in Washington, D.C., had smoked though, a reflection of the generally lower smoking rate among African-American adolescents.

"These tremendous disparities show the need for national action," said Dr. Michele Bloch, who spoke for the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, which joined with other anti-tobacco advocates in Washington on Thursday to urge Congress to support the Clinton administration's FDA initiative.

That proposal would severely restrict the advertising and marketing of tobacco products and would ban some forms of distribution.

CAPTION(S):

CHART[ordinal indicator, masculine]MAP

MAP Where's there's smoke Percentage of people age 18 and older who smoke in each state, based on 1992-1993 data.