Costs of smoking

By: kraftb@kraftb.at

Smoking cigarettes does contain a not to be underestimated economic aspect. More money is being spend for cigarettes as one would assume at the first glance.

The following text is taken from a mailing I recently send to a bunch of people. I hope most of the numbers and facts in the mail are correct and I do not distribut incorrect information. It is a copy of the original mailing.

I also would like to see this article as a follow up to my previous article about natural tooth care. For quite a long time now I have the opinion that our body, health and mind must get better from one generation to the next. I mean it can not be that we get worse every generation - this is not natures intention. No. Nature rather tends to make everything better and more perfect. So the last article about tooth care should not be a "carte blanche" for taking every drug and not caring about ones teeth. I think drugs are what cause the apperance of many diseases of modern civilzation like bad teeth, sight defects like short-sightedness, skin diseases, allergies, etc. So the last article had rather the intention to ease the life of people who already live very healty but are tortured by specific problems.

Luckily smoking cigarettes in bars, cafès and restaurants will be mostly prohibited in Austria from the start of the second half year 2010. Currently if you visit a restaurant or bar you can not get around being exposed to the smoke caused by other people in the room. I notice quite often, that drug addicted people try to force other people to also take their durgs. Either by ignorantly blowing smoke into someone else face or if they are patients who take XTC/e to mix their drugs into other peoples beverages or food. Such behaviour got also observed during the last century when hippies where taking LSD/acid and wanted to share their "experience" with other people even if those others were not really interested in their "pleasures". And if you think about this seriously they are poisoning other peoples air, food and beverages.

 

BTW: I call people "patients" when they are addicted to XTC/e. Usually only people who are sick have to take tablets. But as those people take tablets on a regular basis they must be some kind of patients - at least it looks like they are having some problems. Else they would not have to take this "medicine". But finally this is only meant in the same funny way as "pothead" gets used for canabis addicted people ;)

But now the mailing about the costs of smoking about which I wrote at the start of this article.

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The following mail is about the immense amount of money which is spent each year, worldwide for tobacco consume. This text shows a few relations to let you get a glimpse how much money this is, and what else could have been achieved with it.

If you find this mail interesting feel free to forward it to your family members, friends or even business contacts. If you feel some relations and/or translations to your own language are missing feel free to add them.

Current languages:
* English
* German

Think of this mail as something under a "public license". You are encouraged to change or add parts to this mail. But only modify the text in a way so its sense and intentions are kept: To inform about the enormous amount of money being spent for a senseless and even health damaging habit.

1. Calculations

Each day more than 15 billion cigarettes get smoked worldwide!

"About 15 billion cigarettes are sold daily - or 10 million every minute." - WHO website

http://www.wpro.who.int/media_centre/fact_sheets/fs_20020528.htm

15 bln cigarettes per day * 365 days per year = 5475 bln cigarettes per year

"About a third of the male adult global population smokes." If you assume 1 billion of smokers you can calculate that one single person only requires to smoke 15 cigarettes a day to lead to this immense number.

5475 billion cigarettes per year / ~20 cigarettes per package
==> 273,75 billion packages per year

Cigarette prices in the united states:

http://www.nsra-adnf.ca/cms/index.cfm?group_id=1201

Average price: $5.32 per package

If you calculate using a price of 1.5 US$ per package:
273,75 billions packages per year * 1.5 US$ per package
==> ~410 billion US$ per year

If you review above link about world wide cigarette prices, you will notice 1.5 US$/Euro is irrealistic few.

2. Comparisons

Assumption: 1 USD =~ 1 EUR

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The costs of the olympic games 2008 in Beijing where estimated at about 2,6 billion US$: "2008 Olympic Games cost within 2.6 bln USD"

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-01/25/content_5651534.htm

Meaning by the money being spent by smokers worldwide you could organise 157 olympic games EACH year. As there are about 193 countries/states worldwide: "193 widely recognised sovereign states"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries

this would allow having olympic games like those in Beijing EACH year in almost EVERY country of the world!

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The start of a space shuttle costs about 1.5 billion US$ nowadays. The money getting "blown into the air" yearly by cigarettes would allow 270 space shuttle starts a year - meaning a little less than one start a day!!!

"This works out to an average cost per flight of about US$ 1.5 billion"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle

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The costs for creating and suppling the ISS (International space station) since 1994 sum up to about 100 billion US Dollar. This means the money which is "thrown away" by smokers each YEAR you could have financed FOUR new ISS each year and supply them for more than a decade!!!

"The most cited figure of an estimate of overall costs of the ISS ranges from 35 billion to 100 billion USD

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station

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The United States of America spend about 9.5 billion US$ yearly for environmental concerns:

http://finance.mapsofworld.com/budget/us/environmental-spending.html

So smokers use 42 times more money than the whole United States are spending for environmental matters. The Federal Republic of Germany spends 7,8 billion Euro yearly for environmental concerns:

http://www.bmu.de/ministerium/aufgaben/haushalt/doc/2167.php

So smokers use 52 times more money than a whole large European country uses for it's environmental protection.

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The whole money "trashed" by smoking is almost in the magnitude of the money being spent for military expenditure WORLDWIDE! "World military expenditure in 2006 is estimated to have reached $1204 billion in current dollars"

http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-spending

"The USA is responsible for 46 per cent of the world total"

So: 1204 * 0.46 =~ 554 billion US$

This means smokers worldwide spend about the same money than the United States on their military!!!

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Those embarassing comparisons could get continued almost endlessly. Not even starting to take the money into account being spent for other legal and illegal drugs!!!

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