I believe that there are many different ways we could use this data.
Thanks.

students as young as 14 could smoke in a designated area as long as they had permission from their parent or guardian.

you cigarettes. At school there was not a designated area but about anywhere just off campus was at least ignored.

registered at the office to use our "smoke shack" at school. It wasn't really a shack, it was outside, but had a roof. No one ever checked the smokers, but we were always on the lookout for the principal or a teacher headed out there so those without a permission slip could ditch their butt real quick.

By my senior year, we had started smoking in a more convenient location, and the teachers pretty much ignored us. We had chairs set up and everything that we had taken from different locations around the school.

Thanks a lot, teachers and principal that didn't care. It took me forty years to quit!!!!

No permission needed. This was the mid 80s.

That was in Virginia

What is it with West Virginia?

These are the same people who vote against their own best interests, think that
the "environmentalists" are killing their coal jobs, and listen to their pastor who
tell 'em that God will give 'em an extra comfy couch in heaven if they are mean to
gays.

Pipes were still big in the 1970s. Thus West Virginia lead the drop in cigarettes sales in the 1970s. Since that date more and more young people left West Virginia. Leaving older smokers behind. Thus lower population tied in with older population who were already addicted to cigarettes.

Please note I do NOT mean older people smoke more than younger people but people who came of age in the 1960s smoke more then people coming of age today.

Strokes, cancer, heart disease, emphysema, along with age are real killers.

Dead people don't buy cigarettes. But KY & WV's still higher #s of smokers
has something to do w/education and culture.

And Pittsburgh suffered from the same problems West Virginia and Kentucky were suffering from, the decline in the Steel Industry and the massive drop off of employees in the Coal Industry as they went from deep mines (which employ more men) to Strip mines (Mountain Top Removal). This forced up the average age in all three areas as the "young people" (now in their late 40s and 50s) move elsewhere to find employment.

Thus you end up with a high percentage of people who started to smoke in their teen years surviving till today. The peak year of the baby boom was 1957, which would make such a person only 56 years age today, about when those problems you mention starts to hit. It was this group that was the one wanted by various employers in the 1960s and 1970s and tended to be the ones with enough seniority to stay employed when you had the massive lay offs of workers from the steel Industry in the 1980s and the drop in the number of coal miners roughly about the same time period. Right now these are the people who are the ones dying of cancer and other cigarette related diseases, but most have NOT yet reached that point in their lives. They may have emphysema and other breathing problems, but many still can not quit smoking. In the late 1970s and into the 1980s you saw a huge drop in smoking among males, but these are also the people who never able to get hired by the Steel Mills or Coal Mines, or if they were were laid off. Either way they moved out of West Virginia, Kentucky (And western Pennsylvania) leaving behind a lot of older smokers.

At the same time, while the number of men and percentage of males who smoke dropped in the 1970s, the percentage of women and number of women increased in the 1970s but that number also started to decline the 1980s.

Education...1974...1980..1985..1990...2009
<12...........25.8....29.4...29.0... 24.5..13.1.... -49.2
12............ 27.8....31.6...29.0....25.7...8.7..... -68.7
13-15........32.5....32.7...29.3....25.5....8.4..... -74.2
>15...........27.3....33.3...28.7....22.6...4.8...... -82.4

Women went from 18.7 % of all women who smoked in 1974 to 23.2 % in 1980 then went into decline. If you started to smoke when you were 15 in 1980, you would be 45 in 2010, just entering the age when the affect of smoking starts to hit.

Notice the higher use till 1990 was collage educated followed by people with Associates or higher degree, then followed by high school educated with those with less then 12 grades of education bring up the rear with the lease percentage of smokers.

Also look at the total for each, You have close to a 50% drop in cigarette usage between 1974 and 2009 among the group with the LOWEST Drop in smokers.

Remember you could still get a good paying job in 1974 with only a high school diploma (and if you were male and draft proof in the 1960s, a good paying job WITHOUT a High School Diploma). By Draft proof someone exempt from the draft for example the only son of a widow (I knew someone who met that category and ended up in a management position in the 1990s simply because he was hired in the late 1960s he was the only child of a widow who was also a white Jehovah Witness).

Also remember, the number of people with more then a High School Diploma has increased dramatically since 1974, thus the people making up Collage Educated also tend to be younger then those without high school or just high school education.

http://www.lung.org/finding-cures/our-research/trend-reports/Tobacco-Trend-Report.pdf

Thus AGE may be the biggest factor,

If you read the report, Hispanics and African Americans both smoke in much lower percentages then White non hispanics. In 2009 10.1 % of Whites smoke, that exceeds the 8.7% of African Americans who smoked in 1974. In 1974 27.6% of all whites smoked, while 8.7% of all African American, in 2009 the percentage of whites had dropped in 10.1% and African Americans to 3.2 %. In 2009 1.5% of Hispanics smoked compared to 13.4% of Hispanics who smoked in 1980 (Hispanic was NOT a Category in 1974).

While African America Population tends to follow the same patterns as White Americans, Hispanics tend to be younger and that was true even in 1980. Most people migrant in their 20s and 30s NOT their 50s and 60s.

table 4 is % - black and white populations smoke at essentially the same rates.

Those numbers actually make more sense, I thought the numbers were to low for African Americans and should have known better.

The percentages are HALF what they were in 1965 and down a 1/3 from 1974 (for whites, African Americans drop in Percentages was much slower then whites in the early years). Thus from 1965 to 1997 a higher percentage of African Americans smoked then did White Americans. Pease note HOW the survey was done after 1997 was different then how it was done 1997 and before, so the change may be just a result of how the survey was done, but both groups the perecentages dropped before and after 1997.

Almost half of all men 25-44 smoked in 1965, that is down to 24% today.

Just a guess.

PA, NJ, and MD people might be close enough to the border to run over to avoid the sales tax.

Though NJ might not be as worth it due to bridge toll.

I noticed some states go down and then back up. It seems like the West Coast states lead the way.

I think it follows migration patterns in and out of state.

The sin taxes started in the 70s and have increased since then. Utah has always led the country in nonsmokers because that's one of the things the Mormons do right--forbid tobacco. That means if they want to hide nicotine addiction from fellow church members, they dip or chew. Those aren't showing up on the map.

NM was settled by Indians, then Spanish from Mexico, and then largely by white lung patients from the polluted cities back east. Hospitals here were all started as TB treatment places, fresh air and sunshine being thought the key to treating "consumption" in the pre antibiotic days. It did perk a lot of people up but when they went home, TB did eventually kill them. However, it contributed to low smoking rates here.

The sin taxes aren't terribly bad here but the state has a long tradition of low smoking rates, again because cowboys tended to dip or chew, rather than smoke. Smoking was inconvenient.

That's probably at work in the rest of the Rocky Mountain west. On the coasts, the decrease in smoking rates coincided with borderline insane tax rates on butts. That discouraged a lot of immortal teenagers from taking it up to look cool and that dropped the rate quickly. Continued gains have been made by adults quitting or switching to other nicotine products.

I think the efforts to educate the dangers of smoking is another factor. One thing I would like to see is the change in the sales of "smokeless tobacco" There are a lot more dippers and chewer than in the past.

- the more than just taxes part. And sin taxes often have a disproportionate impact on the poor.

and that was the real idea behind them.

It's working.

Not sure what you are saying here.

Up until 2014, Kentucky was the cheapest place in the country to buy cigarettes. I'm not sure if it got knocked out of first place because it made cigarettes higher or if other states made them more affordable but it would be interesting to see what that does to this graphic in the next few years.

Historically, big tobacco has had a huge influence on KY politics, probably second only to coal. But I don't think they are as powerful now as they used to be. So you're now seeing more local anti-smoking ordinances and things like that.

Thanks for the post.

The taxes themselves were possible because of changing attitudes.

The college years were pretty rough..