Tobacco smoke is responsible for the premature deaths of nearly half a million individuals every year in the U.S. alone. Cigarette smoke is a “portable” air pollutant. Smokers move about, exhaling tobacco smoke into the air we all must breathe. This environmental tobacco smoke has been linked to death from lung cancer of about 3000 nonsmokers each year.

Almost every American who takes up smoking is a child – 3000 every day, more than one million every year. Former Surgeon General Dr. Antonia C. Novello reported in the August 18, 1993 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association that 10% of the children who begin smoking start by the fourth grade, and nearly two thirds start by the tenth grade.

Some facts about smoking:

• Smoking is the single most preventable cause of death in our society.
• In the U.S. alone, smoking costs us more than a billion dollars every week in health costs and lost productivity.
• The life of a 30-year-old who smokes 15 cigarettes a day is shortened by an average of more than five years.
• If you smoke more than one pack per day, you are about 20 times more likely to develop lung cancer than is a nonsmoker. According to the American Cancer Society, cigarette smoking causes more than 75% of all lung cancer deaths.
• If you smoke, you are more likely to develop atherosclerosis, and you double your chances of dying from cardiovascular disease.
• If you smoke, you are 20 times more likely to develop chronic bronchitis and emphysema than is a nonsmoker.
• If you smoke, you are seven times more likely to develop peptic ulcers (especially malignant ulcers) than is a nonsmoker.
• If you smoke, you have about 5% less oxygen circulating in your blood (because carbon monoxide binds to hemoglobin) than does a nonsmoker.
• If you smoke when you are pregnant, your baby will weigh about 6 ounces less at birth, and there is double the risk of miscarriage, stillbirth, and infant death.
• Workers who smoke one or more packs of cigarettes per day are absent from their jobs because of illness 33% more often than are nonsmokers.
• Nonsmokers confined in living rooms, offices, automobiles, or other places with smokers are adversely affected by the smoke. For example, when parents of infants smoke, the infant has double the risk of contracting pneumonia or bronchitis in its first year of life.
• When smokers quit smoking, their risk of dying from chronic pulmonary disease, cardiovascular disease, or cancer decreased. (Precise changes in risk depend on the number of years the person smoked, the number of cigarettes smoked per day, the age of starting to smoke, and the number of years since quitting.)
• If everyone in the United States stopped smoking, nearly half a million lives would be saved each year.