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Show Aiflericszi Smokers Puff Mlm Gsrettes Onlay Per Capita Consumption of Coffin Nails Zooms To 2,324a Year WASHINGTON. Smoking devotees devo-tees in the United States are blowing blow-ing smoke rings to the tune of one billion cigarettes a day. The wartime business boom gave a terrific boost to cigarette smoking, smok-ing, especially among teen-agers and women with good-paying jobs. Sales of factory-made cigarettes jumped from 172 billion in 1939 to 352 billion, more than double, in a per capita consumption of 2,324. Thirty-five years ago the respectable respect-able cigar-smoking business man regarded the smoker of a factory-made factory-made cigarette as a sort of social outcast. Back in the spittoon era many members of congress were tobacco chewers and proud of it. A typical newspaper advertisement of the period pictured Speaker Joseph Cannon, of Illinois, with the caption: "The thinking men of America chew twist." Today the factory-made cigarette not only has wide social acceptance but is a sizeable item in the national na-tional economy. It is estimated that the cigarette tax increases the U. S. Labor Department's consumer price index by nearly one per cent. In 1946 American consumers paid a total of 3.4 billion dollars for tobacco to-bacco products and smoking supplies. sup-plies. The 1929 expenditure for tobacco to-bacco products was 1.7 billion dollars. dol-lars. Cigar Use Falls Off Treasury tax experts who recently re-cently made a study of tobacco use, report that cigarettes in 1946 accounted for 77 per cent of the total tobacco used in production. Back in 1915 cigarettes accounted for only 10 per cent. The use of cigars and smoking tobacco (for pipe and roll-your-own cigarettes) has had a big drop in the past 30 years. The biggest slump has been in tobacco chewing. Consumption Con-sumption recently was less than one-third that of 1918. Cigar smoking in this country reached a peak of 8.1 billion cigars in 1920, the silk shirt year. It dropped to 4.5 billion in depression 1933, picked up some in the years immediately before and during the war. Government research experts say there has been "a significant decline" de-cline" in cigar consumption since February, 1947. They explain that recent increases in the cost of living liv-ing may have affected the demand. Price Increases Consumers recently were paying 6 cents apiece for cigars which before be-fore the war sold at two for 5 cents, an increase of 140 per cent. Changes in smokers' Income or in the price of cigarettes seem to have had only moderate effect on the demand. Between 1929 and 1943, a period which included many depression de-pression years, average changes in volume of cigarettes consumed were less than half as large as the average aver-age changes in income levels. Other government surveys have Indicated that in hard times many people cut clothing and even food purchases before reducing their customary purchases of cigarettes and gasoline. The consumption of snuff has been subtantially unchanged for about 30 years. Thirty-four million pounds were produced in 1916, forty-one forty-one million pounds in 1929 and thirty-six million pounds in 1933. The production peak was 43,800,000 p'ounds in 1945. |
