Increased Health Risks

Doug Blanke is director of the Tobacco Control Legal Consortium, and works to reduce tobacco use nationwide. He was part of a lawsuit that forced the tobacco industry to turn over millions of pages of documents showing how they targeted children in their marketing, hid data on the dangers of smoking, and misled the American public about their products.

      In 1964, the Surgeon General’s Report (SGR) on Smoking and Health found that smoking causes lung cancer. Today, we know the impact of smoking on health and well-being is far worse. “Worse Than We Thought” explores the staggering health effects of smoking that are outlined in this year’s 50th anniversary SGR. Twenty million people have died from smoking in the last half century, including 2.5 million nonsmokers who died from diseases caused by exposure to secondhand smoke. SGR fact sheets address smoking and its connection to specific diseases and health conditions, such as cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.  

• Lung cancer is the leading cancer killer in both men and women in the United States. In 1987, it surpassed breast cancer to become the leading cause of cancer deaths in women.¹

• Lung cancer causes more deaths than the next three most common cancers combined (colon, breast and pancreatic). An estimated 158,040 Americans are expected to die from lung cancer in 2015, accounting for approximately 27 percent of all cancer deaths.²