Cigarette Sales Down Dramatically Over Last 41 Years

The U.S. has done lots of things poorly from a public health perspective, but is a world leader when it comes to reducing rates of tobacco use. 

Also, note that the chart below isn't adjusted for a rising population, which grew 45% in the time period shown. Per capita, cigarette sales are down 81.2% in this 41 year time period.

The average American smokes about 520 cigarettes per year, although, of course, really, a modest percentage smoke far more cigarettes per year, and most people smoke none. According to the Center for Disease Control:

In 2021, an estimated 11.5% (28.3 million) of U.S. adults currently smoked cigarettes.

The average adult cigarette smoker in the U.S. smokes about 6,131 cigarettes a year (about 17 cigarettes a day, a little less than a full pack of 20 cigarettes each day). So, the typical American cigarette smoker is a pack a day smoker. In Colorado, a pack of cigarettes costs $7.99 on average. 

The World Health Organization estimates, considering all kinds of tobacco use, are much higher for the U.S. than CDC figures for adult cigarette smokers (possibly due to a less restrictive definition of who counts as a smoker), but are probably still useful for international comparisons. By that ranking, the U.S. has the 54th highest smoking rate out of 148 countries. Many countries with the lowest smoking rates have low smoking rates because they are too poor to afford tobacco.

At any rate, this doesn't discount the big improvements that the U.S. made made over the last four decades, in an approach that has treated tobacco smoking as a public health problem, rather than as a criminal justice matter.

Some improvements among men who smoke (and men are still more likely to smoke than women in the U.S. by any measure) have been offset in this time period by increased numbers of women smoking (or at least, by a slower rate of improvement among women).