You may notice it the most when you come home from a restaurant or bar and your clothes don’t smell of smoke. Or, maybe it’s when you do get a whiff of cigarette smoke that you realize your nose is more sensitive to it. If you’re a smoker, though, you note the disappearance of cigarette smoking by how many fewer places allow you to light up.
But here’s where scientists have noticed the decline of smoking in the United States: cancer death rates.
The rate of people dying of cancer each year took a nosedive between 2016 and 2017, tumbling 2.2%, which is more than it has declined during any other year on record, according to a recent report by the American Cancer Society.
“It seems to be driven by accelerating declines in lung cancer mortality,” Rebecca Siegel, scientific director for surveillance research at the society, told NPR.
That means the steady decline of cancer deaths in the U.S., while aided by developing technology, has primarily benefited from a declining population of smokers.
Before anti-smoking campaigns of the late ’60s, smoking was a status symbol, and the Marlboro Man was a model of Americana.
“The Marlboro Man stood as an iconic symbol, an individual in control of his destiny,” media studies professor Barry Vacker told the New York Times. “He was a reassuring figure at the height of our fear of nuclear annihilation and a conservative counter to changing values.”
Now, as smoking has become less prevalent, the ripple effect has extended to future generations. Robert Norris, one of television’s Marlboro men, was not a smoker. When he realized the ads weren’t setting a good example for his children, he gave them up.
Our role models are different these days, for better and worse. Our restaurants are laid out differently, too — there are no more smoking sections. Our clothes even smell different. All of these cultural changes are part of the same shift that has registered, in a good way, in our morbidity tables.
