Smoking in women in France

Surveillance of smoking behavior and study of consequences of smoking on the health of the French population, and particularly the female population, is a public health priority. The amount of tobacco consumed can be determined from sales figures and from surveys. Globally, tobacco sales increased through 1985. According to the available surveys, the proportion of regular smokers has varied little as smoking rate has decreased in men and increased in women. The decrease occurred in all age groups for men and increased only in the 25-49 year age group for women. Smoking is the cause of 60,000 deaths per year in France, 57,000 in the male population and 3,000 in the female population. Despite reinforced legislation (The Veil and Evin laws) which is unfortunately poorly applied, tobacco consumption has not decreased greatly. Funding levels for anti-smoking campaigns are totally insignificant compared with the efforts of the tobacco industry to promote their products. However, the beneficial health effect of stopping smoking is truly great since the risk depends much more on the duration of smoking than on the number of daily cigarettes. In addition, the delay between the cause and consequence is long, the consequences of the increase in tobacco smoking among young women over the last 20 years will not become visible until 20 to 40 years from now. One could wonder why so little effort has been put into anti-smoking campaigns despite the readily available data clearly warranting their promotion.