• Smoking is the single largest preventable cause of death and disease in Australia killing 50 Australians daily, 350 each week, and around 19,000 every year.

 

• Smoking causes 20% of all cancers, 21% of all heart disease and costs $12.7 billion a year in health care, lost productivity and other costs (1998).

 

• The decline in the adult smoking rate has stalled on around 25% of the population, with smoking rates of women showing the least decline and rates of smoking amongst indigenous Australians remaining well above the national average.
  
  
• Smoking rates of children are rising after a decade of decline during the 1980s. The prevalence of smoking among minors in ‘the past week’, was 28% and 31% of 17 year old boys and girls respectively (1993).
  

• A child who starts smoking aged 14 years, is 5 times more likely to die from lung cancer than someone who began smoking at 24, and 15 times more likely to die from lung cancer than someone who has never smoked (Doran, Girgis, Sanson-Fisher, 1998 Australian Journal of Public Health vol22 no3).

Smoking causes more deaths than from car accidents, AIDS and all other deaths combined (see below)

Sources:

Australian Bureau of Statistics. Causes of Death 1998, Catalogue no 3303.0, November 1999. AIDS excluded from “infectious and parasitic diseases” category. It has recently been suggested that exposure to tobacco smoke during puberty and pregnancy may contribute to the development of breast cancer (Lash T and Aschengrau A. Active and passive cigarette smoking and the occurrence of breast cancer. American Journal of Epidemiology, 1999; 149: 5- 12.)  

 

• Total expenditure, on anti-smoking education in Australia decreased from around $13.2m in 1989/90 to only $8.4m in 1995/96, and less than $8m in 1996/7. In constant (1989/90) dollars, per capita expenditure fell from 77c in 1989/90 to 40c in 1995/6.

 

• A Commonwealth Report on the costs of drug abuse shows that tobacco represents 67% of the total costs of drug abuse, yet federal funding for drug control directs a mere 6% of funds to anti-smoking controls. Illicit drug strategies receive 94% of federal drug control funds (for the period 1997/8 – 2001/2).

Collins & Lapsley, 1992; Federal Budget papers May 1998.

• Governments currently collect over $4.5 billion in revenue from smokers each year, yet they spend less than $8 million on anti-smoking education.

 

• The amount the Federal government has committed to anti-smoking education up to 2002 represents less than 7% of the total revenue the government is likely to receive from illegal supply of tobacco to children.

CBRC 1996 secondary school smoking & alcohol survey; Australian Retail Tobacconist, May 1998; Commonwealth of Australia Special Gazette No. S358, 15 September 1997; Nos 75. 23 February, 1998

 

• The reason cigarettes are ‘legal’ is because for nearly three decades, the tobacco industry covered up what they knew about the addictiveness of nicotine and the link between smoking and ill health.

 

• Cigarettes are an illegal drug for children, yet surveys show that 250,000 secondary school students smoked cigarettes in ‘the last week’, with up to 70,000 children commencing smoking each year.

Page last updated on 6/11/2001