More than a billion fewer cigarettes smoked each year as people ditch the cigs

Around 1.4 billion fewer cigarettes are being smoked every year according to new research funded by Cancer Research UK, published today in JAMA Network Open*.

Between 2011 and 2018, average monthly cigarette consumption fell by nearly a quarter, equating to around 118 million fewer cigarettes being smoked every month**.

This decline suggests that stricter tobacco laws and taking action to encourage people to quit smoking are working.

The researchers, based at UCL, looked at cigarette sales data for England and compared this with the monthly self-reported cigarette use of over 135,000 individuals from the Smoking Toolkit Study***. They found that the two different methods of looking at how many cigarettes people are smoking provided similar results****.