In 2020, 9% of men and women smoked every day. In the age group of 55–64, the proportion was 17%.
However, the proportion of everyday smokers was only 1% among young people under the age of 25.
After many years of a decreasing trend of daily smoking, there are many indications that the trend is flattening out, figures from Statistics Norway (SSB) show.
The proportion of those who say that they smoke occasionally has been stable at around 10–11% for men and 7–9% for women since 2010.
The statistics show that the older age groups smoke about the same as before.
A total of 17% of men and women in the age group of 55-64 smoke every day. Ten years ago, 23% of men and 20% of women in this age group smoked every day.
Snus use
Snus use has increased in prevalence in the last ten years, especially among young men.
A total of 30% of men aged 25–34 used snus daily in 2020. Among women, snus has been most prevalent among very young women, aged 16–24.
However, the proportion of women who use snus is far lower than among men, with 7% for women and 19% for men.
According to the SSB’s figures, 34% of respondents answered that they drink alcohol weekly, while 4% said they have used cannabis in the last twelve months.
Source: © NTB Scanpix / #Norway Today / #NorwayTodayNews
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This was something that struck me when I moved over here: how many people – especially women and girls, even – smoke, even though it is a virtually guaranteed ticket to a horrible death and in many cases not just the smoker but loved ones around him or her.
It is American Indians’ revenge on Europeans … except it destroys them too.
My grandfather was for a time a day laborer in the Santa Fe railyards back in Galesburg – “Drivin’ em in and tyin’ ’em down,” as Gordon Lightfoot sings in his Canadian Railway Trilogy – who smoked 2 packs of Camels a day. He had become a broad-shouldered grizzly bear.
At the end of his life, he was dying of lung cancer. During my one semester at Knox College I occasionally dropped by his hospice to visit him … and watched him become a shriveled yellow skeleton before he finally died.
And someone older here, who was an addicted smoker and quite proud of her clean-slate health checkups, was very suddenly killed by lung cancer just this year.
Slow suicide and/or you really have to work hard at being stupid, to smoke.
The recent revelations about snus causing birth defects, should wake especially young people up about that, too.
No matter how excellent Norway’s education and health systems are, they’re waste on *willfully* ignorant people.
(Good news: a good friend’s wife did kick a very bad smoking habit, a few years ago, and has managed to stay off the addiction … which is reportedly harder to kick than heroin!)
I should have added that women and girls are even more vulnerable, I have read, because of their smaller lung sizes/capacities.
And does everyone know what blackened, encrusted smokers’ lungs look like? Makes you shudder.