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May 10, 2000-2
Copyright © 2001 Earth Policy Institute
World Kicking the Cigarette Habit
Lester R. Brown
After a century-long buildup in cigarette smoking,
the world is turning away from cigarettes (see
chart below), following the U.S. lead. In 1999 cigarettes smoked
per person in the United States fell by a staggering 8 percent and
for the world as a whole by more than 3 percent.
The U.S. trend is driven by a deepening awareness
of the health-damaging effects of smoking, rising cigarette prices,
rising cigarette taxes, aggressive antismoking campaigns in several
states, and a decline in the social acceptability of smoking. Ironically,
the land that gave the world tobacco is now leading it away from
tobacco.
In the United States, the number of cigarettes
smoked per person has been falling for two decades, dropping from
2,810 in 1980 to 1,633 in 1999, a decline of 42 percent. Worldwide,
where the downturn lags that of the United States by roughly a decade,
usage has dropped from the historical high of 1,027 cigarettes smoked
per person in 1990 to 915 in 1999, a fall of 11 percent.
Indeed, smoking is on the decline in nearly all
the major cigarette consuming countries, including such bastions
of smoking as France, China, and Japan. The number of cigarettes
smoked per person has dropped 19 percent in France since peaking
in 1985, 8 percent in China since 1990, and 4 percent in Japan since
1992, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's world tobacco
database.
Evidence of the damaging effects of cigarette smoking
on human health continues to accumulate. Today there are some 25
known tobacco-related diseases, including heart disease, strokes,
respiratory illnesses, several forms of cancer, and male impotence.
Smoking takes a heavy human toll. The World Health
Organization (WHO) estimates that worldwide 4 million people die
prematurely each year from smoking cigarettes. The 400,000 lives
claimed each year by smoking-related illnesses in the United States
matches the number of Americans who died in World War II. In China,
smoking takes an estimated 2,000 lives per day, the equivalent of
having five fully loaded jumbo jets crash each day with no survivors.
The decline in smoking in the United States was
initially triggered by the Surgeon General’s report on smoking
and health, which was first issued in 1964. Published nearly every
year since then, it has spawned thousands of studies worldwide on
the effect of smoking on health. These studies and the media coverage
of their findings have raised public awareness of the health effects
of smoking not only in the United States but throughout the world.
Over the years, mounting evidence of the effect
of smoking on health gradually undermined the tobacco industry's
steadfast denial of such a link. As it did so, the industry lost
its credibility. Cigarette manufacturers began to lose lawsuits
as juries held them responsible for health damage to smokers. By
late November of 1998, the industry had agreed to pay the 50 state
governments a total of $251 billion to cover past Medicare costs
of treating smoking-related illnesses — nearly $1,000 for every
American.
To cover costs of this settlement, cigarette manufacturers
raised prices. Between January 1998 and January 2000, the average
U.S. wholesale price of cigarettes climbed from $1.31 per pack to
$2.35, a 79 percent increase in two years.
Even as the tobacco companies were raising the
price of cigarettes, state governments were raising cigarette taxes.
By the end of 1999, cigarette taxes ranged from 2¢ per pack
in Virginia, a tobacco-growing state, to $1 per pack in Alaska and
Hawaii. Higher cigarette prices appear to be reversing the recent
upturn in teenage smoking.
Not only did state governments raise cigarette
taxes, they also insisted, as part of the November 1998 settlement,
that the Tobacco Institute, the industry’s powerful lobbying
arm, be dismantled. On January 29, 1999, the Institute, one of the
best funded lobbies in Washington, with a full-time staff of 60,
closed its doors.
Restrictions on cigarette advertising, which began
with a ban on television and radio ads in the United States, are
spreading. For example, the European Union recently passed legislation
prohibiting all advertising of cigarettes by 2006.
Bans on smoking itself are also taking off. Initially
smoking was restricted on airplanes by segregating smokers and nonsmokers.
But in the United States this soon expanded into a total ban on
smoking on planes, a measure that is being adopted by airlines in
other countries.
The same thing is happening in restaurants. In
the United States, the segregation of nonsmokers and smokers now
has been replaced by an outright ban on smoking in restaurants in
five states — California, Nevada, Maryland, Minnesota, and
Vermont. Smoking bans on public transportation and in the workplace
are now found in many countries.
Until recently, U.S. cigarette manufacturers were
not overly concerned that Americans were smoking fewer cigarettes
because they saw a huge market opening up in the Third World, an
unprecedented business opportunity. But they failed to take into
account the globalization of the antismoking effort. Indeed, several
developing country governments are suing U.S. tobacco companies
in U.S. courts, seeking to recover their costs of treating smoking-related
illnesses.
The antismoking campaign is being bolstered by
research indicating that cigarette smoking is a leading cause of
male impotence. The constriction and blockage of small blood vessels
associated with smoking may first manifest itself in the inability
to achieve an erection, well before blockage of the larger coronary
arteries leads to heart disease.
One of the mainstays of California’s highly
successful antismoking campaign is a TV commercial in which a man's
flirtation with a woman fails when the cigarette in his mouth begins
to droop. Experience in California indicates that while adolescent
males may not be particularly worried about their mortality, they
are concerned about their sexuality. In Thailand, cigarette packs
carry in large type the warning “Cigarette smoking causes sexual
impotence.”
As the social costs of smoking become more visible,
and as the number of smoking-related deaths climbs, the global antismoking
campaign is gathering momentum. Governments that once saw cigarettes
only as a source of revenue are now also looking at the spiraling
costs of treating smoking-related illnesses. WHO has launched an
ambitious worldwide campaign to discourage smoking, one that it
hopes will culminate in an international treaty, the Framework Convention
on Tobacco Control, to regulate the use of tobacco.
Meanwhile, the challenge is to sustain the decline
in smoking by expanding further the worldwide educational effort
on the health effects of this costly habit, by further restricting
advertising, by banning smoking in public places and work places,
and by raising taxes on cigarettes to a level that more fully reflects
their cost to society. The goal is to make smoking as socially unacceptable
as it is economically costly.
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FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
From Worldwatch Institute
Lester R. Brown, et al., Vital Signs: The Environmental
Trends that are Shaping Our Future (W.W. Norton & Co., NY: various
years).
Anne Platt McGinn, “The Nicotine Cartel,” World Watch,
July/August 1997.
From Other Sources
U.S. Department of Agriculture, Foreign Agricultural
Service, Tobacco: World Markets and Trade (Washington, DC:
issued quarterly).
World Health Organization (WHO), The World Health Report 1999:
Making a Difference (Geneva: 1999).
U.S. Department of Agriculture, Foreign Agricultural Service, World
Cigarette Database, electronic database, December 1999.
LINKS
The nongovernmental organization leading the antismoking
campaign in the United States.
http://www.ash.org/
Center for Disease Control, information on tobacco use, smoking,
etc.
http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/
USDA, Foreign Agricultural Service reports and data on tobacco
http://www.fas.usda.gov/
Tobacco Free Initiative
http://www.who.int/toh/
World Health Organization
http://www.who.int/en/
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