Facts

Advertising

• Cigarettes are the most heavily advertised products in the U.S. Tobacco companies spend over $5,000 per minute on advertising and promotion of tobacco products. Smoking costs the nation $65 billion per year in health-care costs and lost productivity — that's $262 per American per year.
• People can smoke before they can drink.

Quitting

• About 40 percent of America’s 50 million smokers will try to kick the habit at least once this year. Fewer than one in ten will succeed. — Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Harmful

• In 1996 more than 336,000 Australian school children smoked a total of more than 370 million cigarettes.
• Pregnant women who smoke have higher rates of miscarriages, stillbirths, premature births, and complications during pregnancy.
• Smoking harms not just the smoker, but also family members, coworkers, and others who breathe the smoker's cigarette smoke, called second-hand smoke.
• In the United States, about 45 million people smoke and only 21% are adults.

Smoking Kills

• During the 20th century, smoking killed about 100 million people worldwide.
• Tobacco kills one person every ten seconds and is set to kill ten million people a year by 2025. — World Health Organization.
• Half of all smoking-related deaths occur between the ages of 35 and 69, which translates into an average of roughly 23 years of life lost.
• Every 30 seconds someone somewhere in the world dies of lung cancer. It is the ninth most common cause of death in the world and the most common form of cancer.
• Insurance companies have estimated that smoking a single cigarette lowers one’s life expectancy by 10.7 minutes. That means in smoking a pack of 20, life is shortened by more than three and a half hours.
• Each year more Americans die from smoking-related diseases than from AIDS, drug abuse, car accidents and homicides combined.
• 390,000 Americans die each year from the effects of cigarette smoking. Smoking has been responsible for 16% (or 1 in 6) of all deaths in the U.S. each year.
• In 1997 cigarette smoking accounted for an estimated 117,400 of the total 628,000 deaths in the United Kingdom. Cigarette smoking is thus responsible for approximately one in every five deaths in Britain. This annual mortality translates into an average of 2,300 people killed by smoking every week, 320 every day, and 13 every hour. - Royal College of Physicians.
• Road accidents, suicide, murder, AIDS and drugs and solvents all kill. Smoking kills five times more people before their time than all these other causes of death put together. Smoking is the biggest single cause of preventable disease and premature death in this country. - Smoking and Your Child, issued by Britain’s Department of Health.
• The humble cigarette is responsible for a dozen times more deaths in the UK in the past 40 years than British casualties from World War II - over five million. This is not a cold statistic but a human tragedy - Sir George Albert, Royal College of Physicians.