Covid worries keep stressed smokers puffing

In a famous scene from the 1980 film Airplane!, a tower controller trying to manage an unfolding crisis says: ‘‘Looks like I picked the wrong day to quit smoking.’’ Facing a year of home confinement and economic hardship, many Americans appear to have had the same thought.

Altria Group, the company that owns Marlboro, says decades of annual declines in cigarette sales in the US came to an abrupt halt last year. Sales were expected to fall by 4 to 6 per cent in 2020, but instead levelled off.

The change has been blamed on the Covid-19 pandemic, which kept many Americans at home with money they were not spending – and on the stress induced by widespread layoffs.

‘‘People are feeling stressed, people are feeling lonely, people are feeling bored,’’ said Dr Vaughan Rees, director of the Global Centre for Tobacco Control at Harvard University.

Rees said the idea that stress was partly to blame was supported by other data showing that alcohol consumption had also risen. Also, a series of respiratory illnesses in 2019 that were initially attributed to e-cigarettes might have brought people back to cigarettes.

In Britain, however, the number of smokers might be falling as a result of the pandemic.

A survey by Action on Smoking and Health in July found that a million people had given up smoking since early last year. Researchers at University College London have also found that more people have been quitting than in any year since 2007.

A study in August by the British Medical Journal disagreed, however. The authors wrote: ‘‘A considerably higher proportion reported a recent increase in smoking (42 per cent) than reported smoking less (13.4 per cent).’’