Soc 497 Assignment 1

Kevin McManama
Assignment 1 2/6/2015
Smoking Trends Cigarette smoking is the inhalation of the gases and hydrocarbon vapors created by slowing burning tobacco in a cigarette (The Medical Dictionary). Cigarette smoking is not prevalent to just one place and actually affects the whole world in one way or another.
Smoking can causes cancer, heart disease, stroke, lung diseases, diabetes, and other health implications. According to the Center of Disease Control and Prevention, smokers die roughly
10 years earlier than non­smokers. Smoking causes about 500,000 deaths a year in the
United States and about 50,000 (1/10) of these are from secondhand smoke. This comes out to about 1 out of every 5 deaths in the United States is caused by smoking.
Although smoking is not as popular as it once was it still affects about 1 in every 13
Americans aged 17 or younger today. In 2012, people who were of multiple races actually smoked more on average than people of just one race (26.1%). In comparison non­Hispanic
Whites smoked 19.7% of the time, while 18.1% of non­Hispanic Blacks smoked, and only
12.5% of Hispanics smoked. About 20% of males smoke and 14.5% of females smoke. This means that almost 18% of the population in the United States smokes cigarettes. According to the Center of Disease Control and Prevention, 8.4 billion dollars were spent on cigarettes and advertising in the United States, in 2011. That is a large amount of money focused on something that the United States has started to consider taboo. Cigarette smoking affects the nation’s health and economy.

Figure 1.

Kevin McManama
Assignment 1 2/6/2015
Figure 1, above, looks at a variety of figures about smoking tobacco in Pennsylvania.
This table is also from the Center of Disease Control and Prevention. First it says that the national (median) for smoking is 21.2%. It has Pennsylvania at 22.4% which is 1.2% higher.
Socially, I would say this is because Pennsylvania has two major cities (Philadelphia and
Pittsburgh) along with some other high population areas (Harrisburg, State College, Scranton, and etc). Larger cities would affect the amount of people that smoke, but why would it affect the percentage? According to an article on
TheDailyBeast
, Pittsburgh is the 14th worst city when it comes to smoking so that is probably why the percentages are higher.
There are also differences within Pennsylvania. As was the same with the nationwide statistics more males in PA than females smoke. Also, the higher a person’s education or age the less likely they are to smoke. A few of these differences have to do with race. Figure 1 shows that 21.2% of White adults in Pennsylvania smoke, while 28.7% of African Americans do, 27.1% of Hispanics do, and only 6.0% of Asians do. These are some significant differences. Many African Americans live in the cities so this makes some sense as to why their numbers are higher and the White adults numbers correlates with that of the nations’. I personally am shocked, though, that only 6% of Asians in the state smoke. I do not know why this is, but I could venture that they may have possibly stricter values and smoking is very looked down upon. Figure 2.

Figure 2, above, is a map of the United States. This is a map from The Health Equity and Policy Blog (from Center of Disease Control and Prevention) that shows the smoking

 Kevin McManama
Assignment 1 2/6/2015 percentages of each county in the nation by color. The darker the color (Red/Orange) the higher the percentage of that particular county smokes cigarettes and the lighter the color
(Grey/Blue) the less that county smokes. Some notable areas across the country are
Kentucky/West Virginia, Alaska, California, and Texas. Kentucky, West Virginia, and Alaska are notable because they all have the most noticeable red/orange regions. This means that over 30% of the people who live in these areas smoke cigarettes. This is relevant because these are some of the poorest states and counties in the country. Kentucky and West Virginia are part of the Appalachia country which is the overall poorest part of the nation.
California, Texas, and the New England area are the polar opposites of this. These areas are blue and grey on the map which means that less than 20% of the people who live there, as a whole, smoke cigarettes. These are also some of the wealthier parts of the nation.
The bluest part of the map is right near Hollywood and the very wealthy Beverly Hills. New
England is a wealthy, very educated area as well, and Texas has many business people who also have higher education and wealth.
The most important aspect of Figure 2 is the difference in wealth in the counties that tend to smoke much more than others. Many times people in the poorer (red/orange) areas are targeted more by advertising to start smoking and have less programs in place to help them quit. Also, people who have less money than their peers may be stressed out and people may pick up smoking as a means of coping with that stress. I was happy to notice that the one area that seems to smoke much less than the rest of the nation, according to Figure
2, was State College and Centre County. Figure 3.

Kevin McManama
Assignment 1 2/6/2015
Figure 3 focuses on the top ten countries, percentage wise, for smoking population. I would like the reader to focus on China’s percentage compared to the United States of
America. It is shocking that China has 30% of the world’s smokers. India is a nation with almost the exact same amount of people as China, yet they have 19% less of the world’s smokers (China is 30%, India is 11.2%). The United States is even lower at 4.5% of the world’s smokers. The United States has made a push against smoking over the last 40 years so it is not surprising that they are this low. China has about 1.4 billion people and the United
States has about 315 million people (Worldometers.com). There are roughly 7.3 billion people in the world as of late 2014. China makes up about 19% of the world’s population while the
United States makes up about 4.3% of the world’s population. China has about 4.5 times as many people as the United States so it makes sense that they would be about that much more of the smoker population, but they are not, they are another ten percent more (30% more). This is absolutely shocking.
A reason China may be much higher than the rest of the world, including the U.S., is because it has been a custom in their country for many years. Many Chinese men greet each other and offer the other a cigarette as part of greeting habit. Old Chinese leaders (Mao,
Xiaoping) were chain smokers and smoked in public. Luckily for China, in 2006, they joined the World Health’s Framework Convention Against Tobacco. They have shocking numbers, but have started to decline in the past ten years.
Smoking tobacco has been around for quite a while, but in the early 1900’s it became a social uptrend. The celebrities in the United States and China were seen smoking in the newspapers, movies, and television. The cities in Pennsylvania were thriving (especially
Pittsburgh) and cigarettes were what the “cool” people did. The world also did not have the knowledge that it has now. Cigarettes are bad for people and any attempt to avoid them will help a person’s health.
As the the world gained more knowledge trends in smoking have declined. They are still relatively high though in impoverished areas. Socioeconomic status is very important when studying smoking cigarettes. The wealthier a person is now, the less likely they are to smoke and vica versa. It is also interesting that a person’s race may affect how likely they are to smoke, although this may be because of their socioeconomic status and where they live.
Gender also plays a large role (Way more men smoke than women). Smoking trends are declining, but until people start helping the less fortune (lower socioeconomic classes) smoking will not truly improve and in fact in some poorer areas it may continue to get worse because the tobacco companies have now moved to advertising toward these people who do not have as good support systems in place to stop smoking cigarettes.

Kevin McManama
Assignment 1 2/6/2015
Works Cited http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_facts/ http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/state_data/state_highlights/2012/states/pennsylva nia/index.htm http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/01/07/florcruz.china.smokers/ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/01/03/30­cities­with­worst­smoking­problems­from
­memphis­to­honolulu.html

http://healthequityandpolicy.blogspot.com/2014/04/tobacco­use­today.html http://www.who.int/tobacco/mpower/graphs/en/ http://www.worldometers.info/world­population/china­population/