DailyDirt: Thank You For Not Smoking

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

People have been smoking tobacco for centuries (if not longer), but the health problems associated with tobacco have only been shifting from correlation to causation over the last decade or so. As usual, technology might be able to help... by improving how tobacco is used -- with various kinds of smokeless delivery mechanisms or with better treatments for addiction/cancer/etc. So the trend of a shrinking population of smokers might slow down or reverse course if there's a breakthrough in tobacco tech someday. But don't hold your breath.

• Smokers in the US could be extinct by 2046 -- not from dying, but because fewer and fewer people are smoking and a simple extrapolation points to about 34 years from now. A Citibank report has a few other linear predictions for the end of smoking: the UK in 2040, France in 2118, Germany in 2280... [url]
• In 2000, Philip Morris commissioned an infamous study in the Czech Republic on the impact of smoking -- which found that the cost "benefits" of smokers' early mortality along with cigarette-tax revenue outweighed the economic drawbacks of the healthcare costs for smokers. Live fast, die young... and help the national debt/deficit. [url]
• The FDA is looking at dissolvable, smokeless tobacco products that look a lot like candy. Chocolate, peanut butter and nicotine -- three great tastes that taste great together. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: fda, healthcare, nicotine, predictions, smoking, tobacco
Companies: citibank, philip morris