Smoking

From a recent Freakonomics podcast episode entitled “How to Make People Quit Smoking”.

We actually have a cost per pack, so we actually know that smokers on balance save us 32 cents a pack through smoking due to decreased pension cost, nursing home care cost and the like.

Kip Viscusi, a Vanderbilt University distinguished professor. His article “The New Cigarette Paternalism” gives a breakdown of this saving.

It appears smoking may indeed be a form of self medication.

Perhaps as many as 40 to 50 percent of all smokers have a concurrent mental health disability or morbidity and/or other substance-abuse problem. The cigarette industry has always liked to talk about smoking as being a rational choice of well-informed adults and yet we have this strong correlation between smoking and mental illness.

Kenneth Warner, an economist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health who has been doing tobacco-policy research since the 1970’s.