Tobacco Smoking is Becoming Extinguished

If you've ever watched a loved one dying from lung cancer then it's not something you'll be able to forget in a hurry. It may be of some comfort to you to know that the practice of smoking tobacco is fast becoming a thing of the past, though.

According to a report in The Guardian, Tobacco industry figures in the 1940s showed well over half the over-16s in the UK were smokers, with the proportion rising to nearly two-thirds of men. The proportion of women smokers did not peak until the late 1960s. When the ONS started collating figures in 1974, 45% of Britons smoked, 52% of men and 41% of women.

If we take a look at the statistics in a 2014 report by the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSIC) published by the ONS then we can see the following trends since 1980.

The first graph shows smoking by age group in 1980 (light blue) versus in 2010 (dark blue) showing that smoking in adults overall has dropped from 40% to 20% during that period.:

The second graph shows the number of smokers dropping from about 35% in 1982 to under 20% by 2010, whilst the number of people who have never smoked rises from just over 40% to about 55%:

The HSIC report sites several possible reasons for this, not least being the increasing unaffordability of tobacco products, but today the BBC News site contained a story showing the number of countries that now enforce the displaying of health warnings on packets of cigarettes:

Plus also the rise of the size and prominence of health warnings on packets of cigarettes from being tiny almost illegible text to full packet sized horror show pictures:

And there's one further piece of encouragement in those HSIC stats, namely that young people in the 16-19 age bracket are in fact now less likely to smoke than all other adults age groups, excepting those over 60 who have perhaps realised that life is very finite and worth keeping hold of and started quitting in their droves: