Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Breaking News From the CDC: Smoking Plummets In First Quarter 2015



According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only 15.2% of American adults in the U.S. smoked during January-March of this year.  This is not only the lowest rate in decades, it represents the largest single-year decline in the last 18 years, almost 10%.

The information comes from the first quarter of the 2015 National Health Interview Survey, which is the main federal government source for population smoking estimates.  The early release (available here) might not perfectly predict the smoking rate for the entire year, but it is likely to be close.  The smoking rate in last year’s early release was 17.1%, and the final rate for the 2014 was even lower, at 16.8%.

This is headline-grabbing news, because it shows that the decline in smoking may be accelerating.  As I noted a few weeks ago (here and here), cigarette smoking in the U.S. continues an inexorable decline.  Rather than impeding progress, e-cigarettes may be accelerating a smoke-free revolution.

Thanks to Gregory Conley from the American Vaping Association for the NHIS alert.

1 comment:

CarolAST said...

I had a typo in my post, so let me re-post it.

There's no "plummeting" according to Gallup polls. Those results have fluctuated between 19 and 22% since 2007. And best of all, the percentage who do NOT want to quit smoking has risen from 20% in 2011, to 24% in 2013, to 32% in 2014, to 42% in 2015. That is more than doubling of the proportion of the hard core!
http://www.gallup.com/poll/1717/tobacco-smoking.aspx

And your anti-smoking persecution is a massive violation of our basic civil rights. For the government to commit fraud to deprive us
of our liberties is automatically a violation of our Constitutional rights to the equal protection of the laws, just as much as if it purposely threw innocent people in prison. And for the government to spread lies about bogus smoking dangers is terrorism, no different from making phony bomb threats.

And don't waste your breath with disingenuous claims that the government is entitled to do this under the false pretext of public health, because the government's deliberate use of scientific fraud, and the enshrinement of a corrupt, unaccountable little clique of insiders who perpetrate it, automatically invalidates this justification.