Secondhand smoke, smoking, Surgeon General

More 50-year anniversary stories: Smoking has killed 20 million people since 1964

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Another story on the 50-year anniversary of the Surgeon General’s, this one from Think Progress.

The RawStory article touched on this, but this article deals with it more directly: Since the 1964 landmark Surgeon General’s report, more than 20 million people in the U.S. have died as a result of smoking — 2.5 million of those deaths are blamed on secondhand smoke (boy that’ll drive the Smokers’ “secondhand smoke is harmless” Club crazy.).

Think about that — what a holocaust, and that’s just in the U.S. That’s more than twice the number of people killed in Hitler’s Holocaust — only it happens in slow motion, a person there, a person here. I know I watched my mom’s entire circle of friends wiped out by smoking — almost all of her friends smoked and most of them died of cigarette-caused diseases relatively young. She smoked for 60 years and managed to outlive almost all of them.

 

4 thoughts on “More 50-year anniversary stories: Smoking has killed 20 million people since 1964”

    2. The picture says it all M.
      I have seen friends suffering consequences with cigarette smoking who wants to stop and are not able to.

  2. Hasn’t it picked up in Asia? The smoking rate. It is weird but, depending where I am living either lots of people smoke or don’t smoke. California Bay Area seems to have a lot less smokers than say Podunk Town, Washington state.

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