A character in Christopher Buckley’s 1994 novel Thank You for Smoking (now a film) quotes a then-current prediction printed in the medical journal the Lancet: “[In the] next ten years, 250 million people in the industrialized world are going to die from smoking–one in five.” It’s now 12 years later. I certainly hope the Lancet’s prediction–which I am guessing was bona fide, and not an invention of the novelist–proved to be overpessimistic. In the best estimate of the experts (and by “experts” I do not mean tobacco spokespersons), how many lives were lost to smoking during that ten-year period? –David English, Somverville, Massachusetts
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You’ll excuse my jumping immediately into the arithmetic, David, but let’s think. If Buckley meant that 250 million deaths due to smoking would account for a fifth of all deaths in the coming ten years, we’d be talking 1.25 billion total deaths in the industrialized nations alone–absurd given that the population of those nations in 1994 was right around 1.25 billion. But even if he just meant that the 250 million smoking deaths would claim a fifth of all people then living in the industrialized world, that’s still nuts. The U.S. Census’s international database tells us there were 539 million deaths worldwide between 1995 and 2004; tobacco’s a scourge all right, but if smoking in the industrialized nations by itself accounted for half of human mortality over a decade, it’d make the Black Death look like a bad cough.
Offhand those numbers suggest the toll is mounting more slowly than expected. Maybe, but it’s not like somebody’s going around counting toe tags. All statistics on tobacco deaths, whether looking forward or back, are estimates of varying reliability, and from what I can tell, virtually all the synoptic international figures are the work of Peto and associates. For example, in the World Health Organization’s Tobacco Atlas (2002) I find a page of color graphics with a mortality bar chart in the form of little tombstones, in my mind a sure mark of reliability, plus, in big red numbers, an estimate “of everyone alive today [who] will eventually be killed by tobacco”: 500,000,000. (Attention novelists: That’s lifetime, not in the next ten years. Got it? Lifetime.) Confirmation of Peto’s worst fears? Hold on. The likely source of the scary statistic is longtime WHO consultant–you guessed it–Richard Peto.
