Smoking Rates

I'm one of those non-smoking California types who has grown “allergic” to smoking. Can't stand to be around people who smoke, can't stand the way they stink up the joint, can't stand to look at an ashtray full of butts. The other day at a Santa Monica restaurant, the hostess seated a group next to my table and the whiff of tobacco - which came in on their clothes  - permeated the air like rancid perfume. It almost ruined the taste of my vegan lasagna. That is a crime in these parts.

I'm one of those non-smoking California types who has grown “allergic” to smoking. Can't stand to be around people who smoke, can't stand the way they stink up the joint, can't stand to look at an ashtray full of butts. The other day at a Santa Monica restaurant, the hostess seated a group next to my table and the whiff of tobacco - which came in on their clothes  - permeated the air like rancid perfume. It almost ruined the taste of my vegan lasagna. That is a crime in these parts.

If smoking rates stay at current levels, smoking could create 18 million extra cases of tuberculosis worldwide and 40 million excess deaths from the disease by 2050, a study finds. Researchers produced mathematical models based on various smoking rate scenarios to estimate rates of tuberculosis disease and deaths in each World Health Organization region around the world. The baseline scenario used current smoking levels to come up with the 18 million and 40 million numbers; right now, almost 20% of people worldwide smoke tobacco, and that figure may rise in some poor countries, the study authors said.

When it comes to preventable deaths and disease, smoking is still a top killer in the U.S., says a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Approximately 443,000 people die from cigarette smoking each year, and 8.6 million suffer from a serious illness related to smoking, according to the Tobacco Control State Highlights 2012. Utah claimed the lowest adult smoking rate of 11.8%, according to the report released last week, while Kentucky topped the charts with 29%. California hovered above Utah at 13.7%.

Despite years of anti-smoking campaigns, lawsuits and bans, the smoking rate among American adults has hardly budged during the 1990s--because more and more 18- to 24-year-olds are lighting up. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday that 24.7% of adults smoked in 1997. As a result, the CDC expects to fall far short of its goal of reducing smoking to 15% of the adult population by 2000.

California's smoking rates have dropped to record lows, state officials announced Friday. "Lots of folks said we wouldn't continue to see the declines," said Diana Bonta, director of the state Department of Health Services. "But our ... campaigns are working and the numbers continue to decline," she said. The announcement comes one day after two tobacco companies sued the state to stop it from airing anti-tobacco ads. The latest California Adult Tobacco Survey conducted by the state shows 16.

Miners and people in the hotel and food service industry have the highest smoking rates, while those in education have the lowest, finds a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report on smoking prevalence in various professions. Data from the National Health Interview Survey found that overall the incidence of smoking was highest among those who didn't graduate high school, had no health insurance and lived below the federal poverty line. Smoking rates among all working adults surveyed was 19.6%.

Smoking rates have been declining across the United States -- and with them, so have lung cancer rates, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Men have been abandoning cigarettes at a steady clip over the last decade, with corresponding drops in the lung cancer rates -- 1.4% from 1999 to 2005, and 2.9% from 2005 to 2008. The West led the charge, with a decline of 3.9% in men's lung cancer incidence from 2006 to 2008. "Many of the states with the lowest lung cancer incidence, as well as smoking prevalence, were clustered in the West," the report said.

The nation's war on smoking is faltering because, while overall tobacco use is dropping, the number of people who quit is being largely offset by the recruitment of 3,000 new smokers per day--most of them young. And as this is happening, a series of government research reports to be published today finds, the demographics of smoking are undergoing vast change and, by the turn of the century, tobacco use is expected to become overwhelmingly a habit of the poorly educated.

Your March 11 editorial "Goodby to 'Old Joe,' " contained several factual errors that I would like to correct. First and foremost, the Camel campaign is not targeted to young people. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. is strongly opposed to youth smoking, and has multimillion-dollar programs in place to help counteract the peer pressure that young people feel to experiment with cigarettes, and to better enforce laws that set minimum ages to purchase cigarettes. The statistics the article referred to regarding Camel's share of market among underage smokers are incorrect.

DIEPSLOOT, South Africa - On the sunny side of a dusty township street, next to the metal gates of a school, Lucas Moyana's little shop is just a board propped on four plastic crates like a child's lemonade stand. For a couple of coins, he sells being cool, sells being free. A schoolboy in uniform hurries up, barely glancing at the cookie packets, lollipops and candies, grabs a Dunhill cigarette from a red box, puts a match to it and drops 22 cents on the table before hurrying away.

While the lion's share of youth anti-smoking efforts has focused on cigarettes, a new report in the CDC journal Preventing Chronic Disease suggests more needs to be done to reduce the number of teens smoking flavored tobacco from hookahs. According to a recent survey cited in the report, 18.5% of 12th-grade students admitted to using a hookah in the previous year. And what's particularly concerning to the study authors, led by Daniel Morris of the Oregon Health Authority's public health division, is that many young people don't seem to recognize that hookah use carries serious health risks: Hookah smoke contains many of the same toxins as cigarettes and has been associated with a similar laundry list of diseases such as lung cancer and respiratory illness.

Proposition 29, which would impose a $1-a-pack cigarette tax, is a deeply flawed initiative, and its defeat - which appears likely, though there are many ballots yet to be counted - would be a good thing for California. But even better for the state would be a new cigarette tax initiative that does it right. We urged voters to cast ballots against Proposition 29 because at a time when the state cannot afford to fulfill its most basic responsibilities, the initiative would have put most of the new revenue - more than $500 million a year - toward an entirely new agency and a new state function: the funding of disease research that already is relatively well funded by the federal government.

In the 1970s it seemed like we had problems we could never fix - and I'm not talking about white polyester disco suits and the band Air Supply. The '70s presented America with the residue of a catastrophic war, soaring inner-city crime rates, runaway inflation and subjugation to Middle East oil. To punctuate the dismal vibe, everybody smoked, or so it seemed if you were sitting on an airplane at the edge of the DMZ between the smoking and nonsmoking sections,...

How would you feel if the government told you that you couldn't smoke in your own car? Perhaps you'd endorse the idea that public health officials were trying to make it harder for people to maintain a habit that increases their risk of developing lung cancer, emphysema, heart disease and a host of other problems. Maybe you'd rejoice that you'd never again be forced to carpool to a meeting with a chain-smoking colleague. You might even breathe a sigh of relief for all the children of smokers who would be able to ride to school, soccer practice and piano lessons without being forced to inhale clouds of secondhand smoke.

If smoking rates stay at current levels, smoking could create 18 million extra cases of tuberculosis worldwide and 40 million excess deaths from the disease by 2050, a study finds. Researchers produced mathematical models based on various smoking rate scenarios to estimate rates of tuberculosis disease and deaths in each World Health Organization region around the world. The baseline scenario used current smoking levels to come up with the 18 million and 40 million numbers; right now, almost 20% of people worldwide smoke tobacco, and that figure may rise in some poor countries, the study authors said.

One in five high school students in the U.S. is still smoking, and the rate of decline in smoking has slowed, according to a new report released Thursday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Smoking rates among high school students slowed dramatically from the late 1990s through the early 2000s. But those rates of decline decreased more gradually from the early to late 2000s. The CDC analyzed data from the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey of high school students in public and private schools in all states and the District of Columbia.

Nearly half of all U.S. states asked Hollywood Tuesday to show less smoking in films as part of an effort to reduce cigarette use among teens. In a letter to Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, the attorneys general of California, New York and 22 other states urged him to use his leadership to reduce the depiction of smoking on screen. "We are hopeful you will use your best efforts again here to rally the industry from being a source of the problem," the letter said.

Miners and people in the hotel and food service industry have the highest smoking rates, while those in education have the lowest, finds a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report on smoking prevalence in various professions. Data from the National Health Interview Survey found that overall the incidence of smoking was highest among those who didn't graduate high school, had no health insurance and lived below the federal poverty line. Smoking rates among all working adults surveyed was 19.6%.

Smoking rates have been declining across the United States -- and with them, so have lung cancer rates, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Men have been abandoning cigarettes at a steady clip over the last decade, with corresponding drops in the lung cancer rates -- 1.4% from 1999 to 2005, and 2.9% from 2005 to 2008. The West led the charge, with a decline of 3.9% in men's lung cancer incidence from 2006 to 2008. "Many of the states with the lowest lung cancer incidence, as well as smoking prevalence, were clustered in the West," the report said.