Despite the widely documented health risks, the lurid advertisements warning against the habit, and the frequent price hikes making a packet of 20 as expensive as a restaurant main course, people keep smoking.
And they keep dying as a result – around eight million worldwide each year, according to the World Health Organisation.
The trauma of losing a loved one to a disease such as lung cancer or even seeing a diagnosis has long been thought to act as a deterrent when anti-smoking campaigns fail.
But even that shock does not always prompt an aversion to smoking, according to the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Aix-Marseille School of Economics.
"In most cases, seeing a parent develop cancer does not trigger any significant change in the behaviour of their children once they reach adulthood,” the CNRS says. The statement comes after a study of data taken from the Constances cohort, a French public health programme set up to track around 220,000 adults over several years.
Counterintuitively, the shock "appears too indirect to disrupt deeply ingrained habits,” according to the researchers, who could find only one exception in the data.
For teenagers between the ages of 15 and 18, seeing a parent die from or be diagnosed with a smoking-related illness, there is a subsequent reduction in the likelihood of smoking in turn.
"This is a critical period when many youngsters decide whether to start smoking,” the team says, adding that any "information shock” occurring during the three years "is more likely to influence behaviour.”
"Many public health campaigns are based on the idea that exposing people to consequences is sufficient to change behaviour,” the researchers say.
But the results of the study – and the pervasiveness of smoking despite limits such as bans in public places and in associated settings such as pubs – suggest official efforts to curb the habit are not working.
"These findings point to the limits of that approach, and to the need to rethink levers for action, especially among younger populations,” the CNRS concludes. – dpa
