The Human Costs of Tobacco Use

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Abstract
It has been 30 years since the surgeon general of the United States released the first report of the Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health. In each of the subsequent reports, cigarette smoking has been identified as the most important source of preventable morbidity and premature mortality in the United States. A total of 418,690 deaths in the United States were attributed to smoking in 19901. That figure included approximately twice as many male as female smokers. Of the 2,148,000 U.S. residents who died in 1990, approximately half died of particular preventable causes2 ( Table 1 ). The prominence of tobacco as a contributor to mortality prompted former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop to state that cigarette smoking is the leading cause of preventable premature death in our society and the most important public health issue of our time3.