The Price of Smoking:
What Every Smoker Needs to Know
Smoking kills over 440,000 people every year in the United States and another 47,500 people in Canada. Put another way – 45 Americans and 5 Canadians die every hour due to smoking attributable deaths, making it the leading preventable cause of death. Smoking is more lethal than AIDS, automobile accidents, homicides, suicides, drug overdoses, and fires combined.
For years, studies have shown a correlation between smoking and lung cancer The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ recent annual report, The Health Consequences of Smoking: A Report of the Surgeon General, outlines the latest research on smoking and its negative health effects, and concluded that “smoking harms nearly every organ of the body” and “smoking cigarettes with lower machine-measured yields of tar and nicotine provides no clear benefit to health.” The report also links cervical, kidney, pancreatic, and stomach cancer to smoking, adding to the already exhaustive list of diseases caused by smoking including lung, oral, and throat cancers, as well as coronary heart and cardiovascular diseases.
Between 1965 and 1997, smoking declined among adults by 50 percent. And recent statistics released by the CDC in 2004 show that smoking among youths is at its lowest since 1976. That’s the good news. The disturbing news is that there are still 46.2 million adults in just the U.S – more than one in five – that continue to smoke. Of young people ages 12 to 17, 3.8 million are smokers.
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