New Zealand well on track to be smokefree next year

Almost a quarter of a million fewer Kiwis are now smoking daily, and it puts us in a tiny club of countries that have smoking rates under 7 per cent. What we have in common with these successful countries is people switching from smoked tobacco to less harmful alternatives. To reach the smoking goal of 5 per cent or less (that is, 95 per cent or more of all adults being “smokefree”), around 100,000 smokers need to quit over the next two years. Our decline in smoking in the last four years is extraordinary - equivalent to what took two decades to achieve. The unprecedented progress shown in the New Zealand Health Survey should have been a cause to celebrate. [...]