ABSTRACT
It has been estimated that during the second half of this century, 60 million premature deaths in developed countries will have been caused by smoking and that worldwide annual mortality attributable to smoking will increase from 2 million a year to 10 million a year by 2010 (Peto, Lopez, Boreham, Thun, & Heath, 1994). Peto et al. estimated that 40 million of these 60 million deaths will have occurred in people under the age of 70. This analysis can be extended to smokers in the United States. In 1990, it was estimated that over 418,000 premature deaths (approximately 20% of all deaths) in the United States were attributable to smoking primarily from cardiovascular diseases, cancers, and respiratory diseases (Centers for Disease Control [CDC], 1993). This was approximately 4 times the number of deaths caused by alcohol (100,000) and 20 times the number attributable to illicit drug use (20,000) (McGinnis & Foege, 1993). Even with advances in the medical treatment of tobacco-caused disease, these data suggest that more than 12 million of the 46 million current tobacco users in the United States will prematurely die. This assumes 1) a continuation of the trend whereby 2.5% of smokers quit per year, and 2) that risk on quitting falls to the never-smoker level.
