Smokin' in the Boy's Room

By June the EKU campus will be smokeless. This is a good thing. But how does that compare to the environment many of our students come from?


This from the Washington Post:

Over at Map Stories, Arizona State University’s Sravani Vadlamani put together this visualization of trends in smoking with county-level data. (The red areas are where smoking rates are highest; the yellow and blue areas are the opposite). The sad truth: smoking rates are falling everywhere, but a lot slower in poorer areas.

Like Kentucky, for example. In March, the New York Times reported on a similar trend in smoking data:

“The national smoking rate has declined steadily, but there is a deep geographic divide. In the affluent suburbs of Washington, only about one in 10 people smoke, according to the analysis, by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. But in impoverished places like this — Clay County, in eastern Kentucky — nearly four in 10 do.”

In 1951, about 44 percent of American adults smoked. By 2011, that number had fallen to about 19 percent.