This is genuinely worth celebrating. According to AP reporting, the percentage of American adults who smoke cigarettes dropped to just 9% last year, marking the first time the rate has fallen below 10%. To put that in perspective, in the mid-1960s, more than four out of every ten adults were smokers. That’s a seismic shift in public health, and it’s happened over the span of a few generations.
The numbers come from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey involving more than 24,200 adults. The CDC defines a current smoker as someone who has smoked at least 100 cigarettes in their lifetime and now smokes every day or some days. By that measure, we’re looking at roughly 1 in 11 adults lighting up regularly.
What’s Driving This Decline
It’s not magic. It’s not one single policy. It’s the cumulative effect of cigarette taxes, smoking bans in public places, price hikes on tobacco products, decades of public education campaigns, and a fundamental change in how society views lighting up in public. Remember when restaurants had smoking sections? Yeah, me neither.
The “Tips from Former Smokers” campaign, run by the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, was a particular powerhouse. As quoted from AP reporting, Yolonda Richardson, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, said that campaign alone helped more than 1 million Americans quit smoking and saved over $7.3 billion in healthcare costs. That’s not chump change.
Hold Your Applause
Here’s where the story takes a frustrating turn. Richardson pointed out that recent cuts under President Trump’s administration eliminated the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health entirely. That means the “Tips” campaign, the very program that helped save millions of lives, is gone. Just like that.
The math is simple: fewer resources for smoking prevention means more people will start smoking, and fewer people will quit. We’ve seen this movie before. When funding gets slashed, progress stalls or reverses. It’s not speculative, it’s historical.
The Vaping Wild Card
While traditional cigarette use has been declining, e-cigarette use among adults has been inching upward, holding steady at about 7% in 2025. Here’s the uncomfortable truth: we don’t yet fully understand the long-term health impacts of vaping. We’re essentially running a massive, decades-long experiment on a whole new generation.
The smoking rate dropping to 9% is a monumental public health achievement. But achievements can be unraveled. The question isn’t whether we’ve won the fight against smoking, it’s whether we’re willing to keep fighting.
