The Stats on Smoking

• 6 trillion cigarettes are made each year, worldwide. That is enough for every man, woman, and child on the planet to have 1,000 cigarettes each. 6 trillion cigarettes are enough to fill the Empire State Building 60 times, the Roman Colosseum 250 times, and cover an entire football field stacked 1 mile high.
• We can also consider how much tar, ash, cyanide and other chemicals are inhaled into the lungs when smoking. An average cigarette brings 10 milligrams of tar into your lungs each time you smoke, this means that 60 million kilograms of tar are inhaled into the combined lungs of all smokers each year.
  
  A little perspective: A railroad boxcar can hold 10,000 kilograms, which means that a train of 6,000 boxcars full of tobacco tar is inhaled into the lungs of all smokers combined each year.
• In the early 1800’s the fastest cigarette hand-roller could make about 1 cigarette per minute and about 1,500 per day. Tobacco companies began investing in machines to roll cigarettes, resulting in rapid output of the product, about 20,000 cigarettes per minute to be exact; and these machines operate nearly 24 hours a day.
• 1 billion people smoke every day; this translates to 1 in 7 individuals in the entire world, lighting up every single day.
• In 1900, each smoker smoked about 54 cigarettes a year on average; in 2010, this number is up to 1,500 cigarettes each year!
• In 1900, lung cancer deaths were practically non-existent in the U.S.; in 2010 nearly 160,000 people in the U.S. died from lung cancer, making up 30% of all cancer deaths.
• Secondhand smoke is responsible for 50,000 deaths each year in the U.S.
  
  [2-4]