Wednesday 22 February 2012

I should think so too!

From The Evening Standard:

Almost 160,000 children start smoking every year in the UK (1) - enough to fill around 5,200 classrooms, a charity warned. The 157,000 children aged 11 to 15 who take up the habit every year could also make up 14,000 junior football teams (2), according to Cancer Research UK.

The charity, which supports a move to plain packaging for tobacco (3), says eight out of 10 people start smoking before they are 19 and more must be done to prevent youngsters starting. The data refers to the proportion of children in an age group who were smoking a year after first saying they were smokers. Almost a million under 15s - more than a quarter (27%) of all children - have tried smoking at least once. (4)


1) About a fifth of adults are regular smokers, and there are about 800,000 children born each year, so by and large, we'd expect a fifth of them to take up smoking = 160,000.

2) Yes, we get it. 160,000 children = 5,200 classes, 14,000 football teams, 32,000 five-a-side teams, 10 army divisions or 1 very long conga line.

3) Aha. It seems like only yesterday they were telling us that when people start smoking, they consider themselves "a social smoker and not an addicted smoker because they never smoked alone, they never bought cigarettes and they smoked only when they were drinking." So if they don't buy cigarettes in the first place, how can the packaging influence their buying decisions?

4) That seems about right, when I was a lad, maybe a quarter of the class used to go for the occasional foray "behind the bike sheds", or in our case, across the road in the public park.

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