Tobacco control

How it saves lives

Cigarettes kill slowly, through cancers, heart disease and lung disease that build over decades. Tobacco control treats none of that. It stops the smoking from starting, by making cigarettes less appealing, less convenient and less normal: blunt warning labels, bans on advertising and on smoking indoors, higher taxes, and help for people who want to quit. Fewer people start, more people stop, and the deaths that smoking would have caused simply never happen.

The story

In January 1964 the US Surgeon General stood up and said plainly that smoking causes lung cancer, at a time when roughly half of American men smoked. It began a long, unglamorous campaign of warning labels, lawsuits, advertising bans, indoor-smoking rules and taxes. Decades later, researchers put a number on what that campaign was worth. Comparing what happened against what would have happened if smoking had kept climbing, they estimated tobacco control avoided about 8 million premature deaths in the United States between 1964 and 2012, and saved 157 million years of life, close to twenty years for each person spared. It is one of the largest public-health wins ever measured, and it is not finished. Smoking still kills more people than almost anything else we know how to prevent.