Think Smoking is a Thing of the Past? Don't Hold Your Breath

How would we explain to a man from Mars that, daily and in significant numbers, humans put rolled-up tubes of paper filled with shredded vegetation in their mouths and solemnly set fire to them?

Depending on where you are, it can seem that the smoking habit should inexorably be disappearing. Cigarette addicts huddle miserably in the rain-swept doorways of smoke-free buildings, and suffer pariah treatment from their non-smoking workmates when they slink back to their desks. Airlines and dating agencies bar smokers from using their services. Advertising and sponsorship bans are proliferating everywhere. (You can no longer smoke in an Irish pub!). World Health Organisation figures have branded tobacco a bigger hazard to human health than malaria and tuberculosis combined. American juries hand down sentences requiring tobacco companies to pay hundreds of billions of dollars in punitive damages to smokers. It can't be long now, you'd think, before the "demon weed" disappears altogether.

In which case you'd be wrong. There are large parts of the planet where cigarette smoking continues to advance as an automatic fact of daily life. As prohibitionists, drug tsars and cigarette taxers usually find to their dismay, bad habits don't disappear, they just migrate, and enrich the bootleggers in the process. Britain has recently seen a marginal increase in cigarette consumption, but recorded legitimate sales have been noticeably down. The percentage of the market officially unaccounted for can only be attributed to the professional smugglers. When Canada hiked tobacco taxes in the early 1990's, Canadian cigarette exports to the neighbouring USA shot through the roof, then collapsed again when the taxes came off. A plausible explanation would be that all those filter-tips were quietly filtering back northward over the border.

It was once proved that smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics, and this author is not about to argue with science. A recent compilation of smoking figures from four continents demonstrated that, in much of the world, the unhealthy habit has never been healthier. Chile, Peru, Spain, France and Germany all had adult smoking populations half as high again per capita as the USA and Britain.

Some discernible geographic patterns emerge. The further east (if you're a man) and south you are, the higher the likelihood of your being a smoker. Spanish-speakers elect to smoke in bigger numbers than those who speak English, French, German or Portuguese. Catholic countries seem to have more smokers than protestant ones, implying a touching faith that Rome will forgive your lungs as well as your sins.

Size of country is an ambivalent indicator, but small countries often seem to have more smokers than big ones. (Greece produces Europe's highest cigarette consumption, The Economist (www.economist.com) recently revealed, at eight cigs per adult per day. Iceland and Switzerland are the runners-up, at six a day). Biases by sex can vary widely. In China, Russia and Mexico, male smokers outnumber females by enormous margins, implying that lighting up there carries a lingering connotation of machismo, or its oriental equivalent. In Britain, however, there are already more female smokers than males. This reflects a continuing decline in smoking overall, contradicted by a sharply increased uptake of cigarettes by young women.

Logic says tobacco's days are numbered. But this, dear visitor from Mars, is Planet Earth.

Smoking, a thing of the past? Don't hold your breath.