10 States Most Addicted to Cigarette Smoking, Guess How Many Permit Cannabis Use

Health.com recently used “government data on smoking (and quit) rates, smoking bans and restrictions, cigarette taxes and sales, and deaths attributable to smoking” to identify the top 10 states where people are most likely to smoke themselves to death with tobacco.

Personally, I believe informed people can make their own decision on tobacco use, so long as they bear the cost of that decision, vs. society. Thankfully, it’s getting more and more difficult to find prohibitionists who will argue that tobacco (or alcohol) is less harmful than cannabis for humans.

There may be no correlation at all, but here are two items I find interesting looking at the list of 10 tobacco-loving states and cannabis:

• 20 of the 50 states have medical and/or recreational laws for cannabis, or 40% of the states in America. Randomly sampling, one would expect 4 of the 10 cigarette states to have cannabis laws in place, or 40% of them. However, none of the 10 cigarette states that made the list have any sort of legal cannabis.
• These states are clustered in the Southern US, where Health.com points out tobacco is extremely lucrative in many of them. 21 states produce tobacco in the United States. Kentucky and North Carolina alone produce two-thirds of the nation’s tobacco harvest.

None of the top 10 cigarette smoking states have laws permitting cannabis use…

Here’ the top 10 states smoking cigarettes in alphabetical order (along with a fun tobacco fact):

1. Alabama (including 23% of kids in grades 9-12)
2. Arkansas (27% of adults smoke cigarettes)
3. Kentucky (most high school smokers in US)
4. Louisiana (>25% smoke, can smoke in alcohol bars)
5. Mississippi (no restrictions on smoking at child-care facilities)
6. Missouri (cigarette taxes only ~12% of national average, spiking demand)
7. Oklahoma (birthplace of Marlboro Man)
8. South Carolina (lowest quit rate in nation, only 2% successful for a year+)
9. Tennessee (among worst for cigarette packs per capita sold & smoking-related deaths)
10. West Virginia (buys most packs per year at 113, 28.6% of adults smoke)

Lets protect the health of our aging nation and start legally offering cannabis. Cannabis can serve as a substitute good for tobacco (and alcohol), if marijuana was legalized and properly regulated. Studies show cannabis serving this vital substitute role, so lets legally (also) offer a significantly less harmful product relative to tobacco.