Cigarette Smoking

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30977, 5 February 1966, Page 14

Cigarette Smoking

Medical authorities may find some comfort in the figures produced by the survey held recently by the National Association on Smoking and Health, which showed a decline in smoking habits in the last five years. Cigarette manufacturers, however, can afford to be complacent, for their production figures show an increase over the last five years.

Of the 206 people questioned for the National Association on Smoking and Health’s survey, 49 per cent of the men and 39 per cent of the women smoked cigarettes, averaging 20 cigarettes a day and 15 respectively. If this sample is typical of the New Zealand population aged 16 and over, it indicates a national consumption of nearly 5000 million cigarettes a year. This estimate is broadly consistent with official estimates of production, and with quantities of tobacco and cigarettes on which duty was collected. In 1964, 3796 million cigarettes were released for consumption in New Zealand. Of the 3.9 million pounds of tobacco released for consumption, perhaps half would be in the form of pipe tobacco and cigars; if rather more than half was in the form of cigarette tobacco, this could bring the cigarette total for that year nearly up to the 5000 million indicated by the survey of smokers. Complete figures for 1965—the year of the survey—are not yet available, but figures for the first 10 months show a small increase in cigarette production and a decline iu tobacco production.

In 1959, according to the National Association on Smoking and Health, 63 per cent of New Zealand men were smokers. “These figures indicate that “ the general decline in smoking habits first shown “ to have occurred in relation to doctors as a group “ has spread to the whole population, especially to •• adult males ”, said the secretary of the association (Mr S. W. Taylor). This conclusion is difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile with the national statistics of cigarette consumption, which rose more than 63 per cent between 1959 and 1965, while the adult population rose only 12 per cent The consumption of tobacco fell 27 per cent in the same period—reflecting, probably, the tendency of smokers who formerly rolled their own cigarettes to switch to ready-made cigarettes. The extent of this change in smoking habits can only be guessed, in the absence of a breakdown of tobacco production, over the last six years, into cigars, pipe tobacco and cigarette tobacco; but a reasonable allowance for this factor still shows an increase in the consumption of cigarettes—ready-made and rolled by the smoker himself —of the order of 30 per cent This is well in excess of the population increase in the same period, and thus contradictory to Mr Taylor’s conclusion. The association’s survey covered only 206 people, which is too small a sample to be reliable. I National statistics, though deficient in some respects, are less suspect than estimates derived from insignificant samples. The campaign against cigarette smoking, with its attendant risks of lung cancer, has evidently a long way to go.