More and More Adults Quite Smoking

Published on December 22, 2008 5:04 AM

During 2007 smoking cheap cigarettes among U.S. adults decreased, with less than one in five lighting up. Last week was applauded by anti-smoking groups 20 percent of people who quit smoking. They acknowledged that an ambitious goal of a 12 percent adult-smoking rate by 2010 is not likely to happen.

Their big goal was set in November 2000 as part of the Healthy People 2010 project. Dr. Matthew McKenna, the director of the Office on Smoking and Health at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said: "If we want to see far more people quit smoking, we need expanded access to stop-smoking programs, continued progress in eliminating secondhand smoke exposure and ongoing investment in programs that work."

Scientists reported that 43.4 million U.S. adults smoked in 2007, or 19.8 percent, compared with 45.3 million in 2006, or 20.8 percent. The rate essentially was unchanged from 2004 through 2006. Statistics show that the number of adult men who smoke still exceeds, 22 percent of men smoke, compared with 17.4 percent of women and the number of white adult smokers was 21.4 percent, compared with 19.8 percent for blacks and 13.3 percent for Hispanics.

In a report was shown that the percentage of everyday smokers who have tried to quit smoking has dropped from 47 percent in 1993 to nearly 40 percent in 2007. Older smokers were less likely to quit than those ages 18 to 24. Some of health-advocacy officials said that about 80 percent of smokers who successfully quit cigarettes tend to do it "cold turkey" rather than through stop-smoking products or programs.