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The young and urban make up majority of ‘party smokers’

Cigarette.Photo: Lise Åserud / NTB scanpix

The percentage of Norwegians who smoke from time to time has remained stable at around 10% for 30 years, a new report showed.

 

Admittedly, the percentage has fallen to between 8 and 9%,but the downward trend does not follow the same curve as those who stopped smoking daily.

The Norwegian Institute of Public Health has considered smoking habits and development in 2017 in the recent Tobacco Report in Norway.

‘’The smokers differ from the daily smokers in several ways.They are younger, more urban and have higher education. In addition,they smoke less, rarely alone, and they think they have control over their own smoking,” said Marianne Lund, researcher at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.

Oslo and Finnmark

Of the counties who have above the national average of party smokers,or ’time to time’ smokers as the Public Health Institute calls them, we find Oslo,Telemark, Rogaland, Hordaland, Troms and Finnmark. At the same time,Finnmark,Telemark and Østfold are on top of the counties with 16% daily smokers, and Oslo is lowest (with Akershus and Sør-Trøndelag) by 9%.

Lund explained that smokers are a heterogeneous group. Among other things,there is a very large variation in cigarette consumption. An interesting feature of the party smokers is that almost half of them see themselves as non-smokers.

‘’It may seem that smoking is an intermediate stage. In a Norwegian study among
20-year-olds, almost 60% had finished with it after seven years’’, she said.

Snus and geography

The Norwegian Institute of Public Health said there is a complex explanation of why some counties are high on daily smoking while others are low. Comparing figures for the period 2002-2006 with today, it is plain that some counties are still high.

“Demographics such as age composition and education are important,” Lund said.

Close proximity to the border and tax free trade can also be taken into account.

The distribution of the use of snus is also still the way we are used to seeing.

Trøndelag’s numbers are still high. Nord-Trøndelag has 18.8% of snus users,Sør-Trøndelag 17.3%, Finnmark has 17.7 % of snusers, while Oslo secured a fourth place in snus consumption (at 16.2%) just before Nordland at 16.1%.

 

© NTB scanpix / #Norway Today