Sammendrag
After 100 years of mass consumption of cigarettes, the smoking epidemic is on the verge of a historic decline phase in Norway. The article shows the number smokers and the breakdown of tobacco consumption between men and women from 1927 to 2007.
The total consumption of tobacco was estimated by adding up registered and unregistered sales. Data was collected from the Directorate of Customs and Excise and the tobacco industry, respectively. Gender-specific consumption was calculated on the basis of information about the percentage of smokers and self-reported daily consumption excerpted from time series of representative cross-section surveys.
Most men, around 800 000 of them, smoked in the early 1960s, but the annual consumption of cigarettes per adult male did not peak until the mid-1970s, when it reached 2.8 kg. The number of smokers among men had been reduced by half and consumption reduced to 1.5 kg per adult male in 2007. Consumption peaked among women in about 1990, but stopped at 1.8 kg, i.e. one kg less than the maximum for men. The number of women smokers has only been reduced by some 150 000 individuals since it culminated at approx. 600 000 in the early 1970s. More than 70 per cent of the total number of cigarettes smoked from 1927 to 2007 were smoked by men.
Men have been the greatest victims of the tobacco epidemic in Norway. A sex convergence in smoking has been observed since 1995.
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