Decades of health awareness campaigns by us and groups like us have made a difference among the young, just like smoking cessation and harm reduction tools such as nicotine vaping, gums, and patches have helped older people mitigate harm. Recent data show our "5 by 35" campaign begun in 2008 - down to 5% of Americans smoking cigarettes by 2035 - seems to be on track.
It will happen because some older people will die, some will quit and, most importantly, fewer will take it up. Smoking cigarettes, like alcohol, is nearly always a pediatric disease. If people don't do in youth, they are unlikely to take either up at 25.
Scholars at UN San Diego and the California Department of Public Health looked at data from 18 Tobacco Use Supplement to the Current Population Surveys during the years 1992 to 2022, nearly 1.8 million respondents who responded with having smoked 100 cigarettes in their lifetime, and found a 13% decline so far this century. Older people led the declines but you would expect that when young people had so few to start. And age was the common factor in the reduction. Despite culture warriors insisting it is related to income (somehow poor people have more discretionary income) or race (ban menthol), age is the only difference in data.
That's a big improvement from 1955, when nearly 57% of U.S. adults smoked cigarettes and nearly all had started as children.
Because it's a California analysis the authors can't resist targeting vaping but, just like UC San Francisco, UC San Diego has received a small fortune from Johnson & Johnson, which makes nicotine-based competitors to vaping devices. Systemic conspiracies may be happening in one industry segment but a whole lot of people think Big Pharma is the Big Tobacco of this decade so the authors look a little too cozy with drug companies by suggesting tobacco company executives are risking prison by targeting kids. The data from the survey show it is not happening.
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