Members of the EU have a goal to become “Smoke-free” – meaning less than 5% of people still smoke.
So far the only country on track to meet that goal is Sweden which stands at a staggeringly good 5.6% smoking rate!
In the last decade the smoking rate in Sweden dropped by a whopping 55%! Also smoking related deaths are 22% lower than the EU average.
You can read more in the WVA factsheet here – all graph data below is from this document.
How Did They Do It?
Just as a contrast the graph below from the WVA shows the comparison of annual declines in smoking rates of different countries from 2012 to 2022.
As you can see Sweden comes out on top, closely followed by Japan, New Zealand, USA and the UK.
The smoking rate in Sweden declined 6 times faster than Australia which has very strong restrictions on Tobacco Harm Reduction (THR) products such as vaping.
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