The Health Consequences of Smoking—50 Years of Progress

Surgeon General, 2014
Fifty years after the release of the first Surgeon General’s report warning of the health hazards of smoking, we have learned how to end the tobacco epidemic. Over the past five decades, scientists, researchers and policy makers have determined what works, and what steps must be taken if we truly want to bring to a close one of our nation’s most tragic battles—one that has killed ten times the number of Americans who died in all of our nation’s wars combined. This report highlights both the dramatic progress our nation has made reducing tobacco use and the continuing burden of disease and death caused by smoking.