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The Centers For Disease Control and Prevention released a Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report recently with some interesting new figures in it. It seems more than a fifth (21.3%) of adult Americans use tobacco products daily or semi-daily. That amount jumps up to more than a quarter (25.2%) if you include individuals that use tobacco rarely.

Holy crap! 25% of American adults use some amount of tobacco products!?!

Anti-tobacco advocates and public health organizations love to pat themselves on the back for having done such a wonderful job fighting tobacco. Certainly rates have declined, but clearly there is still quite a long way to go.

What’s more, that figure is probably a little higher for the general populace as the sample does not include institutionalized individuals (which have a high propensity for smoking). As well, smokers generally score lower on measures of agreeableness and seem less likely to participate in a random phone survey — which is how the CDC got its information for the report. Both of these factors mean that the actual prevalence of tobacco use might skew a little higher and the amount consumed by the average user might be a good bit more.

There’s quite a double standard when it comes to surveys on tobacco and electronic cigarette use. Many surveys by the CDC and others consider even one use of an electronic cigarette within the 30 days previous to the survey to be current use. They also tend to refer to trial of e-cigs (use once and then never again) simply as use or prevalence. Meanwhile, rare use of tobacco products in this case is pushed deeper into the background as if it doesn’t matter.



You can read the CDC’s report here.