SMOKING TRENDS IN THE NETHERLANDS SINCE 1958
The trends in Dutch smoking can be followed since 1958. Percentages dropped from 89 to 36% among men in 2000. This shows a long-term effect of the anti-smoking discoveries in the 1950's. At first smoking increased among women, an emancipative development. Later the slope went slowly downwards to 29% in 2000. Percentages of smokers decreased annually with 0.8% among men and 0.4% among women in 1983-2000.
Two decades ago, I wrote about smoking trends during 1958-1982 [1]. Smoking decreased from 44% to 33% in the period of 1982-2000.
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Surveys: 'Risky habits' 1958 (20+), 'Products and people' 1963 (20+), TON-1967 and 1970 (15+), NOP-1975, 1977, 1979 and 1982 (15+), CBS 1989-1999 (16+) and NIPO 2000 (15+). |
Prevalences of adolescent smoking changed little. In the 1990s I analysed a cohort study and wrote about the unpredictability of the onset of smoking at the individual level [2]. If it is hardly possible to predict, the onset will be terribly difficult to manipulate by anti-smoking groups and the industry.
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The percentages of smokers are divided by age in 2000. Smoking differs little in the age of 16-64. Plausible explanations for the late decrease are overmortality among smokers and the advice of general practitioners to unhealthy patients.
Tobacco policy has strongly improved since the millennium. Sales restrictions for tobacco products, nonsmoking at the workplace and further advertisement restrictions were introduced in 2003. Nonsmoking in public transport, higher tobacco taxes and a large cessation campaign were the measures of 2004. Smoking will be banned from the hotel and catering industry in 2008. We advised such measures in the eighties [3].
Jan van Reek
Notes
1. J. van Reek (1984) Smoking behaviour in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom: 1958-1982. Rev. Epidém. et Santé Publ. 32, 383-390.
2. Reek J van, Knibbe R et al. Predictors of smoking behaviour. The Dutch Cohort Study of Secondary Schoolchildren. In: K. Slama (ed), Tobacco and Health. New York and London: Plenum Press 1995, 387-9.
3. Reek, J. van, Adriaanse, H. (1987) Smoking policy in the Netherlands since the fifties. Health Policy 7, 361-8.
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