U.S. Smoking Rate Remains Unchanged
April 29th, 2009 | by admin |ATLANTA (AP) — Despite years of anti-smoking campaigns, lawsuits and bans, the smoking rate among American adults has hardly budged during the 1990s — mostly because more and more 18-to-24-year-olds are lighting up.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday that 24.7 percent of adults smoked in 1997. As a result, the CDC expects to fall far short of its goal of reducing smoking to 15 percent of the adult population by 2000.
“During the 1990s we’ve made virtually no progress whatsoever,” said Michael Eriksen, director of the CDC Office of Smoking and Health. “The fact that we can’t get rates below 25 percent really speaks to the addictive power of nicotine.”
About 48 million adults smoked cigarettes in 1997, according to a CDC survey that year of more than 35,000 people nationwide. The rate was the same — 24.7 percent — in 1995. It was 25.5 percent in 1990.
Among most adult age groups, smoking rates actually declined from 1990 to 1997, but the percentage of smokers ages 18 to 24 increased during that period, from 24.5 percent to 28.7 percent.
U.S. smoking rates have dropped drastically since 1965, when 44 percent of adults were lighting up. Over the following quarter-century, more health warnings came out, tobacco ads were banned from the airwaves and no-smoking signs appeared in restaurants, offices and airplanes.
However, smoking rates leveled off during the 1990s rather than continuing to drop.
At the same time, public awareness campaigns continued to warn of the dangers of smoking. The patch and nicotine gum went on the market. And states sued tobacco companies to recoup the cost of treating sick smokers.
“The bottom line on this is it just speaks to how tough it is to quit and how addictive tobacco is,” Eriksen said.
Philip Morris, the nation’s largest tobacco company, had no comment on the CDC report.
Health officials anticipate a drop in smoking rates in 1999 because cigarette makers raised their prices after their $206 billion legal settlement with 46 states.
And there is another sign that the numbers could begin falling — according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, per capita cigarette consumption declined 15 percent between 1990 and 1997.
Shane Toepher, a 23-year-old student at Georgia State University in Atlanta, said the cost of cigarettes is a major reason he is trying to quit.
“It costs too much money,” he said. “Smokers are aware of what’s out there — that it’s not good for you and it’ll kill you. They just don’t care.”
Anti-smoking advocates said the popularity of cigarettes among young adults is troubling, but it is also the group where further reductions are most likely to occur.
“We’re all pretty much agreed that the efforts to prevent youth from smoking, or getting those who have just begun to experiment to put it away, is where we’re going to get success,” said Joann Schellenbach, spokeswoman for the American Cancer Society.
Copyright 1999 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
