Facts That Inform and Inspire
March 24, 2020
When smokers want to banish cigarettes from their lives, some try going cold turkey, some try hypnosis, and some replace them with chewing gum or nicotine patches to end the habit.
“Approximately 34 million American adults currently smoke cigarettes, with most of them smoking daily. Nearly all adult smokers have been smoking since adolescence. More than two-thirds of smokers say they want to quit, and every day thousands try to quit,” Robert R. Redfield, M.D., director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), says in the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2020 “Smoking Cessation” report.
But research by the CDC shows these efforts can go in vain: Fifty-five percent of American smokers said in 2018 that they tried to quit in the previous 12 months, but only 8% actually did.
55%
8%
What are some of the challenges to quitting today?
While the CDC finds that cigarette smoking causes about 1 in every 5 U.S. deaths annually, the nation’s smoking rate has steadily fallen — it reached an all-time low of about 14% in 2018. And as of 2018, 55 million American adults had quit smoking. But it’s important to note that e-cigarette use is on the rise — it increased from 2.8% to 3.2% between 2017 and 2018, according to this CDC report, which marks a significant increase in adult e-cigarette use that was detected for the first time.
Learn more about Americans today: Smoking