subject: What Do Smoking Rates In The United States Tell Us? [print this page] According to the CDC, there are five million tobacco-related deaths a year worldwide, and over 40 million in the United States. The WHO worries that at current rates, cigarette smoking will reach global pandemic levels within the next 30 years. While global smoking trends are quite worrisome, movement at home is somewhat more encouraging. Despite the recent report by the U.S. Surgeon General's office that teen and adolescent smoking rates are not falling in tandem with overall rates, the general numbers for smoking in the United States are a good sign.
A study that looked at smoking in developed countries found that rates have dropped from roughly half of populations smoking in the 1950s to around 20 percent today. In the United States, the drop has been similar, from over 40 percent 50 years ago to just under 20 percent today. This is the result of a relatively consistent rate of change over this time period. Smoking continues to be more common among men, but the gap is much smaller than it was in the 1950s. Something like 24 percent of men and 18 percent of women smoke now, depending on how the statistic is measured.
Perhaps more surprising, smoking is a young habit. 30 percent of people aged 18 to 29 said they had smoked in the past week when asked for a Gallup poll, while only 9 percent of those 65 and up responded the same way. The poll also discovered that this is because the older a person is, the longer they have had to succeed in quitting. There's roughly a two-to-one ratio of quitters to former-smokers in the 50 to 64 age bracket, and an impressive five-to-one ratio among those 65 and over. The report goes on to presume that this disparity in smoking levels may also be because many older smokers have been killed by the habit.
Studies of the National Health Interview Study conducted by the CDC show that smoking rates and quitting success rates are strongly correlated with educational achievement. People with a GED or lower level of attainment were between two and eight times as likely to be smokers as those with a graduate degree, while people with a high school diploma or less had the lowest rates of successfully quitting. And this group comprises nearly half of all smokers in the United States.
All this data shows that despite successes curtailing smoking, the next step in combating smoking and cigarette-related illnesses in the United States will be much more difficult. It will require more effective programs designed to discourage people from starting to smoke at a young age, and need to include various specific programs effectively tailored to impact the highest-risk groups.
