A Massachusetts town that adopted an unusual ordinance banning the sale of tobacco to anyone born in the 21st century is being looked at as a possible model for other cities and towns hoping to further clamp down on cigarettes and other tobacco products.
As the other user pointed out, cigarettes kill far more Americans than cars or guns. I’m with you on the gun thing. But the car safety stats are always increasing because we do in fact put a huge amount of effort into them - from seat belt laws to firewalls to airbags to automatic braking… there’s too many to name. Now there’s the recent move of making them bigger, harder to stop, and with reduced visibility, so we might see those gains flatten out in the next half decade or so.
We’re also going to start to see a decline in cigarette related deaths as fewer and fewer are smoking them these days. There’s an intersection of public health messaging, government policies on age of access, taxes, and other efforts that are really starting to pay off. I think the e-cigarettes are also helping, but that’s a whole discussion of its own.
So cigarette related deaths are still pretty high, but it will start to fall off. I can’t remember the exact prediction but let’s just call it falling by half in the next decade. Cigarettes are deadly, but they take a long time to kill.
Smokers born in the 40s and 50s are the ones dying from things like cancer and heart disease today, and the replacement rate (new smokers versus loss from people quitting or dying) isn’t working in tobacco’s favor.
Here are some stats.
i was more referring to pedestrians.