50 years of progress cuts smoking rates in half — but can we ever get to zero?

Smoking rates cut in half. Eight million lives saved. More than 800,000 fewer lung cancer deaths. Fifty years after the U.S. Surgeon General first warned about the dangers of smoking, the benefits of quitting have never been clearer.
Yet 18 percent of the population still smokes. Nearly 2,000 teenagers take up the habit every day and tobacco companies advertise candy-flavored tobacco products with impunity. Is it possible this is the best the United States will ever do?
Health experts are convinced it isn’t — and they point to maps that rank states and regions by smoking status as proof. A look at a county-by-county breakdown of who smokes and where makes it clear that there are opportunities to get smoking rates way down, they say.
Kentucky has the most smokers — more than 28 percent of the population smokes there, compared to just 11 percent in Utah, which has the lowest rates, and double the 14 percent in California. And when you overlay those smoking maps with details of rates of heart disease, stroke and cancer, it’s equally clear that there are still plenty of lives to be saved by trying.Rothmans Blue
How?
“(With) taxes, strong smoke-free laws and fully funding state tobacco prevention programs,” says Dr. Mariell Jessup, president of the American Heart Association. “These measures can reduce the number of adult smokers to less than 10 percent of the population in 10 years.”
Also, raising the legal age to buy tobacco products to 21 would go a long way to stopping kids from ever getting addicted in the first place, the Heart Association, American Lung Association, American Cancer Society, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and other groups agree.
“We do it with booze yet we don’t do it with cigarettes, when cigarettes kill about 10 times more people than alcohol does,” says Dr. Michael Fiore of the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention.
Smoking is often just another marker for social and economic disparities, Fiore adds. “Fewer than 10 percent of college graduates smoke,” Fiore points out. But 35 percent of people who never graduated from high school do.
“Two things will solve this issue over time and eliminate tobacco use. One is hard-hitting public policy. At the same time, we need the ready availability of treatments for smokers.”
A 50 year public health battle
It was Jan. 11, 1964 when then-Surgeon General Dr. Luther Terry held a news conference to announce that smoking causes cancer and probably heart disease, too. It was a time when close to half of Americans smoked — including Terry himself — and it set off a 50-year battle between regulators and the tobacco industry.