Earlier this week I had a conversation with a journalist (who will remain unnamed) about the acceptance of tobacco smoke in Vancouver and how it's noticeably gone down over the years. It was sparked by the smell of somebody lighting up a joint at a public event and nobody around them saying a word or seeming to be at all negatively affected by what might be considered an intrusion, then the same group of surrounding folks holding their noses and complaining loudly when somebody else lit up a cigarette nearby (please note that it was neither me nor the unnamed journalist who were smoking either substance!).
"Can you do that somewhere else?" is something I often hear when I see people smoking tobacco (usually on public beaches and in parks where it is, in fact, ILLEGAL to do so now), and it got me to wondering if we smoke more or less in BC than other provinces. So I tweeted the question to the BC Lung Association and their crack social team quickly sent me THIS LINK to a Tobacco Use in Canada report which has a ton of useful info (96 pages of it).
The first big revelation this 2011 report offered me was the fact that in 1965 almost HALF of all Canadians over the age of 15 smoked, and that it fell to around 17% between that year and 2011.
The most interesting (and awesome) piece of info is that compared to all the other provinces BC currently has the least amount of tobacco smoking adults.
One thing that's not mentioned in this study are e-cigs and the effect that they're having on the numbers of smokers, so I guess we'll see that data show up on the next report. Bottom line is that I wanted to say happy healthy BC Day weekend to all of you, smokers and non!
