{"id":15211,"date":"2019-02-01T01:36:52","date_gmt":"2019-02-01T01:36:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=15211"},"modified":"2019-02-02T08:13:29","modified_gmt":"2019-02-02T08:13:29","slug":"whos-smoking-now-and-why-it-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/whos-smoking-now-and-why-it-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"Who\u2019s smoking now, and why it matters"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kenneth E. Warner<\/a>, University of Michigan<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Suppose you were told that there is something responsible for nearly 1 of every 5 deaths of Americans, and that it is completely avoidable. Would you believe \u2013 today \u2013 that \u201csomething\u201d is cigarette smoking?<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re a college graduate, you might not believe it. You don\u2019t smoke. Your friends and colleagues don\u2019t smoke. You never see smoke in your workplace, nor in the restaurants and bars you frequent. Like many of the nation\u2019s most educated citizens, you may well regard the problem of smoking as largely solved. Because the educated population is also the most politically engaged, cigarette smoking has virtually disappeared from the nation\u2019s health policy agenda.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not a smoker, although like many of you I was one (45 years ago, in my case). As a student of tobacco policy for over 40 years, I have helped to document the remarkable progress we have made against smoking. But I also appreciate why smoking remains our nation\u2019s most avoidable cause of disability and premature death. The lack of policy attention to smoking is a public health tragedy.<\/p>\n

The good news and the bad news<\/h2>\n

No one can deny the extraordinary victories against smoking. Since the 1964 Surgeon General\u2019s report<\/a> on smoking and health, adult smoking prevalence has dropped by two-thirds<\/a>, from 43 percent to 14 percent.<\/p>\n

The decrease among young people<\/a> has been even more substantial. For example, since smoking peaked among high school seniors 20 years ago, smoking prevalence in the past 30 days has plummeted by nearly 80 percent.<\/p>\n

Prompted by tobacco control initiatives, Americans\u2019 decisions to quit smoking and not to start in the first place avoided 8 million premature deaths<\/a> from 1964 to 2012. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers tobacco control one of the 10 greatest public health achievements of the 20th century<\/a> and of the first decade of the 21st<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the good news. The bad news is that 1 of every 7 adults still smokes. And smoking kills nearly 500,000 Americans every year<\/a>. That number exceeds \u2013 by a lot \u2013 the sum total of all deaths caused by the opioids<\/a> and other drugs, alcohol<\/a>, motor vehicle injuries<\/a>, homicide<\/a>, suicide<\/a>, HIV\/AIDS<\/a> and fires<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Who smokes now? The role of education<\/h2>\n

What accounts for the divergence between common perceptions about smoking and the dismal reality? In large part it is remarkable changes in who is smoking. Increasingly, today\u2019s smokers are those with lower education, lower income and – importantly – a higher incidence of mental illness.<\/p>\n

Consider this: In 1966, the smoking rate of Americans who hadn\u2019t graduated high school was just 20 percent greater than that of college grads. By 2017, in contrast, the smoking prevalence of the least educated was nearly four times greater than that of the most educated.<\/p>\n

Smoking has declined substantially at both ends of the education spectrum but to a much higher degree among college graduates: by half among Americans lacking a high school degree, but by 85 percent among college graduates.<\/p>\n

For college grads, the rate of smoking in 2017 was vanishingly small. For those without a high school degree, and indeed for high school grads too, fully 1 out of 5 remain smokers. The difference matters. Research<\/a> attributes a fifth to a third of a large education-related gap in life expectancy to differences in smoking.<\/p>\n