Germany Grapples with a Smoking Uptick
Public health officials in Germany are raising the alarm over an unexpected uptick in cigarette smoking—including among the young—that started in the wake of the Covid-19 lockdowns, I reported last week for The Wall Street Journal.
The overall smoking rate in Germany was just over 34% in July, according to the most recent findings from Debra, a bimonthly survey funded by the German Health Ministry. In March 2020, the rate was 26.5%. The percentage of Germans between 14 and 17 years old who said they smoked cigarettes jumped to 15.9% in 2022, from 8.7% in 2021, according to Debra.
This makes Germany an outlier among other developed nations. Other European countries, including Sweden, Ireland and the Netherlands, have seen steady decreases in smoking rates, said Rüdiger Krech, director of health promotion for the World Health Organization.
“We’re so baffled around this,” he said. “In so many areas of public health and health systems, Germany is performing very well. Here, it is an outlier.”
The smoking rates across Europe are higher than the U.S., where 11.5% of people were smokers in 2021, according to the CDC. It was a particular split-screen for me coming from New York: you can still smoke here in outdoor cafes and parks. The cost for a pack of cigarettes is around €7 – about half of what a pack costs in the Empire State. That price just went up as the state increased the cigarette tax to $5.35 per pack, which is the highest in the nation.
Smoking is even rarer among youth in the U.S. About 4% of 12th graders said in a 2022 survey that they had smoked in the last month. I remember speaking to some high school students a few years ago and the principal mentioned, offhand, that he hadn’t busted anyone for smoking in the bathroom for two years.
German researchers are still probing the exact cause of their uptick. But part of what keeps people from smoking are social controls that broke down during the pandemic when people started working from home, said Heino Stöver, an addiction specialist at the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences.
“I saw in many Zoom conferences that people were smoking who I never thought were smokers,” he said.
The German government is now moving to legalize marijuana. While tobacco smoking in New York has fallen, data show that public pot smoking has increased. It remains to be seen how that will play out in Europe.
THE QUESTION: Which European country, in 2019, had the highest daily smoking rate?
Know the answer? Drop me a line at jimmy.vielkind@gmail.com. Or just write with thoughts, feedback or to say hi.
THE LAST ANSWER: Composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg, Austria.