Who Bears the Ancillary Cost of Tobacco Use?
by Patrick Fleenor Background Paper No. 36 Executive Summary Smoking appears to be a very risky behavior. Indeed, some have suggested that it is one of the riskiest activities that an individual can engage in over a lifetime. This view is reinforced repeatedly in Americans’ daily lives, from ads on television to the Surgeon General’s warning on cigarette packs. Yet despite the deluge of information about the hazards of smoking, smoking has not diminished markedly since 1990. Today, approximately 50 million American adults, or roughly one quarter of the adult population, smoke cigarettes. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control, the percentage of Americans who choose to smoke has remained essentially unchanged since 1990. While many nonsmokers can not fathom the benefits of smoking, we know that smokers freely exchange hundreds of billions of dollars of value each year for the opportunity to smoke cigarettes. Not content to recite evidence that smoking harms individuals’
