Lighting up

It’s not too early to start laying plans for next year. With that in mind, I’m looking for another hobby. Chinese has proven too difficult for my feeble mind. Astronomy is a time-sucking black hole that pulls all the hours from my schedule. See? Finding a wholesome hobby isn’t easy. Maybe my interests have been too esoteric. I think I should find something simpler and more popular for next year.

Meanwhile, I crossed paths with this number: 5.8 trillion. That’s the worldwide number of cigarettes consumed last year. And, yeah, that’s “trillion” with a “T.”

So that’s what everyone’s been doing. They’ve been smoking! Talk about popular; it’s hard to argue with that kind of number. Is smoking considered a hobby? I really don’t know, but before I can short-list it as a prospect, I figured I should look into it a bit.

Of those 5.8 trillion smokes per year, China is the biggest market, followed by Russia and then the United States.

A 2012 Washington Post article took a look at 2011 per-capita cig consumption. Eastern Europe dominated the top of the list, with Serbia leading the pack with 2,861 cigs a year. Russia and many other nations in Eastern Europe were very close to that amount.

China, Korea, and Japan all shared the same general range with each other, roughly 1,800 a year, give or take a couple of hundred either way. That’s still a lot of smokes per person.

I took a look at some U.S. data, but it’s a little bit apples-to-oranges because what I saw wasn’t a broad per-capita figure, but was, instead, a figure based on those 18 years of age or older. Anyway, on this note, InfoPlease.com lists the per-capita U.S. figure at 1,232 cigarettes for the year 2011, the most recent year listed.

To put that in perspective, in 1965 the figure was (yikes!) 4,259 cigarettes. That was the peak year. So smoking in the U.S. has come way, way down.

Shifting gears to yet another source of data, the Centers for Disease Control have a report that breaks things down by state. Here, again, we switch our age focus, and this data looks at the 15- to 35-year-old group. And instead of broad per-capita figures (which include smokers and non-smokers), this data is concerned with the percentage of a population that smokes.

Within that group, the year 2006 saw Kentucky with the nation’s highest percentage of smokers at 28.6 percent. Next came West Virginia, 25.7 percent; Oklahoma, 25.1 percent; and Mississippi, 25.1 percent.

Utah had the smallest percentage of smokers for any state, at 9.8 percent.

From a quick perusal of the data, it looks to me that in the U.S., men are a bit more likely to smoke than women are. There are exceptions; in Montana, for example, a slightly higher percentage of women (19.6 percent) were tallied as smokers than men (18.5 percent) were; but the difference is so small it could just be statistical fuzz.

Health-conscious California weighed in with a 14.9 percent prevalence of smokers; for women it was 11.4 percent, for men it was 18.5 percent.

The Mariana Islands were not included in that CDC report, but Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands were. Smoking prevalence was 17.4 percent in Puerto Rico and 12.1 percent in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

From various sources, I’ve seen that smoking rates in Asia are often higher than the U.S., and the rates of smoking are usually heavily skewed toward males.

One of the first things I noticed when I worked in Saipan’s tourism industry was that so many of our customers were smokers. It never caused any problems, but we were careful to brief our clients in advance so they’d know when they could, and couldn’t, light up.

Still, here’s a random thing I learned the hard way: The world’s worst field-expedient ashtray is a beer or soda can, since people often crimp them, and those crimped cans will rip vehicle upholstery or, for that matter, anything less hardy than high-carbon rolled steel. So if you serve smokers, you’ve got to have a place for the related detritus.

Anyway, all this stands in the shadow of that towering statistic: 5.8 trillion cigarettes are consumed every year. Having looked over some of the related data, I’ll admit I’m sick of thinking about it. The prospect of lighting up has lost its novelty. So I’m still in the market for a hobby. Hey, they tell me stamp collecting is fun. I wonder how many stamps are sold every year…