Big Tobacco Wants YOU to Keep Smoking Reuters
go to original May 26, 2013

Trailer for Jason Reitman's 2005 Thank you for Smoking (PlasmaKong2)

Cigarette companies are boosting the money they spend on giveaways and similar promotions in the United States as they attempt to pitch to a declining pool of cigarette smokers.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which has periodically put out a report on tobacco sales since 1967, said on Tuesday that 274 billion cigarettes were sold or given away in 2011, the most recent year for which data was available.

A decade earlier, in 2001, major tobacco companies sold or gave away 402 billion cigarettes in the United States. Volume declined in each of the intervening years.

The number of U.S. smokers has been declining steadily. As of 2011, roughly 19 percent of U.S. adults smoked cigarettes, compared with about 33 percent in 1980, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Advertising spending on cigarettes, meanwhile, ramped up in 2011 for the first time since 2003, rising to $8.4 billion from $8 billion in 2010.

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