Smoking Statistics in United States of America

Smoking Statistics

  1. Among Americans, smoking rates shrunk by nearly half in three decades (from the mid-1960s to mid-1990s), falling to 23% of adults by 1997. In the developing world, tobacco consumption is rising by 3.4% per year.
  2. Cigarettes cause more than one in five American deaths.
  3. Smoking-related diseases cost the United States more than $150 billion a year.
  4. Over 50,000 people a year die from secondhand smoke in the US alone.
  5. In the 1980s, tobacco companies started working on making fire-safe cigarettes. Ones that would be less likely to ignite furniture or clothing and cause fires. As of 2002, only one of the hundreds of U.S. cigarette brands uses fire safe technology, and cigarettes are still the number one cause of fire-related deaths.
  6. In the US, smoking causes about 445 new cases of lung cancer every day.
  7. Tobacco kills more Americans than AIDS, drugs, homicides, fires, and auto accidents combined.
  8. US-based multinational Philip Morris – the world’s biggest cigarette company – was the world’s ninth largest advertiser in 1996, spending more than $3 billion.
  9. A survey a few years ago found that nearly 80% of American advertising executives from top agencies believed cigarette advertising does make smoking more appealing or socially acceptable to children.
  10. In 1997, the tobacco industry’s spending on advertising in the United States was about $15 million a day ($5.7 billion for the year).