Has the smoking rate stalled?

From the BBC...

 

Smoking decline stalls since Covid as more young people take up the habit - study

A decades-long decline in smoking in England has nearly ground to a halt since the pandemic, a study suggests.

The rate of decline slowed from 5.2% in the years before the pandemic to just 0.3% between April 2020 and August 2022, according to the research.

The lead researcher said it was likely more young people had taken up smoking and that urgent measures were needed.

 

Of course she did. The study is here. It was written before Rishi Sunak went crazy and announced a weird, sliding age-based prohibition, but the BBC is using it as a justification for it. 

 

Based on surveys with 101,960 adults representative of the population, researchers estimated 16.2% smoked in June 2017, falling to 15.1% by the start of the pandemic, in March 2020, but just 15% in August 2022, since when the the slower rate of decline has remained consistent.

 

She didn't actually do this research. She just used the figures from the Smoking Toolkit Study. Those figures show that the smoking rate was 15.4% in 2019 and was exactly 14.8% between 2020 and 2023. There was a marked rise in smoking rates among 16-21 years in 2020 which has since gone into decline (although not back to 2019 levels).

 

Researchers noted higher levels of stress and social isolation among younger adults during the pandemic.

 

Yep. We also saw a large rise in alcohol-related deaths and childhood 'obesity' in 2020.

Young adults may start smoking because they believed e-cigarettes were equally bad for them, Dr Jackson said.

 

Yes. That too. The EVALI panic took place in 2019 and people are hopelessly misinformed about the relative risks of vaping and smoking these days. 

 

There are certainly reasons to think that smoking might have had a mini-revival in recent years, but has it really?

The ONS survey - usually considered the best source - shows the smoking rate steadily ticking down every year.

Among 18-24 year olds, the rate dropped from 16% in 2019 to 14.7% in 2020 and had dropped to 11.6% by 2022.

Among 25-34 year olds, the rate dropped from 19% in 2019 to 18% in 2020 and had dropped to 16.3% by 2022.

Overall, the rate has been falling by roughly 0.5 percentage points every year since 2016, except 2020 when it was nearly flat (but still fell slightly). 

There is also the fact that tobacco sales have fallen. In 2019/20, 25.9 billion cigarettes were sold. By 2022/23, it was down to 20.3 billion. Rolling tobacco sales rose in 2020/21, presumably because people were unable to buy it abroad thanks to lockdowns and travel restrictions, but the total figure was still lower in 2022/23 than it had been in 2019/20.

I dare say there has been a shift to the black market, but a 20% drop in cigarette sales doesn't seem consistent with flat-lining smoking rates.

It is possible that the ONS is wrong, the Smoking Toolkit Study is right and the drop in sales is all down to the black market growing, but we must at least consider the possibility that the Smoking Toolkit is wrong. Its survey went online in April 2020 and has stayed online whereas I think the ONS survey went online but is now back to being done in person. We know how much difference switching from face-to-face to online can make.

Whatever the truth, the 'public health' mob will cite whichever statistics are most useful to them and those are the ones the BBC reported.