Survey Indicates Decline In Smoking

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30971, 29 January 1966, Page 1

Survey Indicates Decline In Smoking

(New Zealand Press Association) DUNEDIN, January 28. A small house-to-house survey by the National Association on Smoking and Health indicated a general decline in smoking habits.

Of 206 people questioned, 49 per cent of the men and 39 per cent of the women smoked cigarettes, according to figures given in the “New Zealand Medical Journal” by the association’s secretary, Mr S. W. Taylor. The men averaged 20 cigarettes a day and the women 15. In 1963 40 per cent of male doctors smoked and in 1959 63 per cent of New Zealand men were smokers. In Britain, 75 per cent of men smoked in 1962. “These figures indicate that

the general decline in smoking habits first shown to have occurred in relation to doctors as a group has spread to the whole population, especially to adult males,” Mr Taylor says. He said that the decline might have been concealed to some extent by the habit spreading to younger groups of school children. Eighty-two per cent of those interviewed had favoured a complete ban on the advertising of cigarettes and tobacco (9 per cent against and 9 per cent undecided).