U.S. smoking rate stabilizes at 1 in 5 adults

LOS ANGELES — After 40 years of continual declines, the smoking rate in the United States has stabilized for the past five years, with one in every five Americans still lighting up regularly, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Tuesday.

Moreover, more than half of all children are exposed to toxic secondhand smoke and 98 percent of those who live with a smoker have measurable levels of toxic chemicals in their bloodstream, setting them up for future harm from cancer, heart disease and a variety of other ailments.

"If you smoke and have children, don't kid yourself. Your smoke is harming your children," Dr. Thomas Frieden, CDC director, said in a news conference.

Using products marketed as being less harmful is no panacea, he added. "All cigarettes kill equally, and we know that light and low-tar cigarettes are no less likely to kill you."

Despite the reduction in smoking, it remains the No. 1 cause of preventable death in the United States, Frieden said. Every year, an estimated 446,000 Americans die from smoking-related diseases.

The good news is that some states are making progress in combating smoking. Utah has the lowest smoking rate at 10 percent and California is second, with a rate just below 13 percent, according to the CDC. Since 1986, adult smoking in California has dropped by about 40 percent and, as a result, lung-cancer rates have been declining four times faster than in the rest of the country.

In contrast, Kentucky and West Virginia have the highest smoking rates, with about 26 percent of adults lighting up regularly.

If all the states had cancer-prevention programs like California's and Utah's, Frieden said, 5 million fewer people would be smoking and at least 1 million fewer people would die. About $25 billion now is available to states from cigarette taxes, but only $700 million of that is spent on smoking prevention.

Another reason for the recent lack of success in getting fewer people to smoke is that the tobacco industry has gotten better at sidestepping government efforts to minimize smoking, Frieden said. Among its activities, he said, are targeting price discounts at kids to get them to start smoking and finding new ways to promote products, such as flavored lozenges.

According to the study, published in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, about 20.9 percent of adults smoked in 2005 and 20.6 percent in 2009. In 1997, about 36 percent of high school students smoked. That proportion dropped to 22 percent by 2003, but has since declined more slowly, to 20 percent in 2009.