U.S. Anti-Smoking Drive Falling Short

Every year they--the smokers--are fewer in number. A couple less souls clustered in the office doorway. A few more gum chewers.

But smokers are not quitting in big enough numbers for the United States to meet a long-standing goal of reducing smokers to 15% of the adult population by 2000, according to a new UC Irvine study.

With 16 months before the target date, about 24% of American adults smoke, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The new study concluded that about 21% of adults in the United States will still be smoking on Jan. 1, 2000.

The study, published Tuesday in the American Journal of Public Health, found the smoking rate has declined steadily in the United States for the last 20 years. But the decline isn’t occurring fast enough to meet the 15% goal established in 1987 as part of a national health initiative called Healthy People 2000, which set health and fitness objectives for the American public.

The findings are important, study authors say, because tobacco is responsible for nearly one out of every five deaths in North America.

“I feel it’s a shame that we haven’t done more to help adult smokers to quit,” said UC Irvine marketing professor Cornelia Pechmann, the lead author of the study.

Pechmann and her co-authors--Philip Dixon of the University of Georgia and Canadian government health official Neville Layne--analyzed smoking data from Canada and the U.S. from 1974 to 1994. Canada, which has a higher rate of smoking, set a more modest goal of 24% of adults smoking by the year 2000, a figure it is close to reaching.

The study, funded in part by a Canadian advertising firm that does anti-smoking campaigns for the government, concluded that more money was needed in the anti-smoking fight.

The study singled out the success of California, a state that spends five times the national average on anti-smoking programs and has one of the lowest smoking rates in the country. About 18% of California adults smoke, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, putting California within range of the Healthy People 2000 goal.

“In California, where we have made an effort to help people quit, they have quit in record numbers,” said Pechmann.

The study put the cost of duplicating the California program nationwide at about $680 million in the United States and $76 million in Canada.

But another study, published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., found that California’s anti-smoking efforts are faltering in part because funding for anti-tobacco education has been funneled to other health programs.

One reason the national decline in adult smokers has not been greater may be that health officials have focused more emphasis on preventing young people from ever smoking than on getting older smokers to stop. But even those efforts have met with mixed results.

The UC Irvine study, which focused primarily on adult smoking, also cited other research that shows teen smoking is increasing after years of remaining stable.

President Clinton has made reducing the number of teens who take up smoking a priority, a policy which took a hit last month when a federal appeals court ruled the FDA could not regulate tobacco as a drug.

Pechmann said the U.S. set an ambitious goal, but in the end did little to make it a reality.

“We didn’t put the resources behind that goal,” she said.