For most of the twentieth century, a cigarette in hand was practically a universal accessory, a prop in movies, an office ritual, a fixture at dinner tables. That picture has shifted more than most people realize. In a handful of countries, the decline in smoking has moved from gradual to genuinely historic, reshaping public health outcomes in ways that were barely imaginable a generation ago.
The reasons behind these shifts vary widely, from aggressive taxation and advertising bans to the rise of alternative nicotine products like vapes and oral pouches. What follows is a look at eight countries where the numbers tell a particularly striking story.
Sweden
Sweden has spent years quietly becoming the least smoking-heavy country in Europe. In 2023, Sweden had the lowest smoking prevalence in the European Union, at 8% among people aged 15 and over, compared with an EU average of 24%, with figures of 9% for men and 8% for women. Daily smoking has fallen even further since then, dropping to a small fraction of the adult population by 2024.
Daily smoking prevalence in Sweden in 2024 had fallen to just 5.4% among individuals aged 16-84 compared to 12.8% in 2008. Much of that progress traces back to snus and, more recently, nicotine pouches, which have given smokers an off-ramp that doesn’t involve combustion. In 2024, only 5.8% of Swedish women aged 16-84 smoked, representing approximately a 39% drop since 2016.
Norway
Norway tells a similar story to its Scandinavian neighbor, though through a slightly different route. Norway, which is not subject to the EU ban on snus, has cut its smoking rate to 7 per cent. That figure reflects daily smoking specifically, and it places the country among the lowest in the world for that measure.
The country’s youth population reached an early milestone in this transition. Norway’s young population achieved smoke-free status as early as 2015, followed by Sweden and Canada in 2018, New Zealand and Australia in 2022, and Denmark in 2023. Snus, long a cultural fixture in Norway, has effectively displaced cigarettes among large segments of the population rather than simply adding another nicotine habit on top.
New Zealand
New Zealand has positioned itself near the front of the pack in the global race toward what public health researchers call “smoke-free” status, generally defined as prevalence under five percent. Sweden leads the race, with only 5.8% of its population smoking, while New Zealand ranks second at 6.8%, followed by Norway in third place at 7.0%. That puts the country within striking distance of a threshold few nations have ever approached.
Much of the movement has come through a different mechanism than Scandinavia’s oral tobacco tradition. Outside Europe, New Zealand is verging on smoke-free status because of vaping. Alongside vaping’s rise, the country reached smoke-free status among its youth population in 2022, a marker of how quickly attitudes toward cigarettes have shifted among younger New Zealanders.
United Kingdom
Britain has just passed a threshold that public health officials had been anticipating for years. In 2024, for the first time since national records began, more adults in Great Britain used e-cigarettes than smoked tobacco cigarettes, with 10.0% of adults aged 16 years and over being current e-cigarette users compared with 9.1% who smoked tobacco. That crossover marks a genuine shift in how the country consumes nicotine.
The longer trend line is just as telling. Smoking prevalence fell from 20.2% in 2011 to 10.6% in 2024. Young adults have driven much of that change, with smoking among 18–24-year-olds declining sharply from 25.7% in 2011 to 8.1% in 2024, while vaping prevalence among 16–24-year-olds fell from 15.8% in 2023 to 13.0% in 2024. Scotland still lags slightly behind the rest of the UK, but even there the downward trend has held firm for over a decade.
South Korea
South Korea’s decline is notable partly because of how high smoking rates once climbed, particularly among men. The overall cigarette smoking rate dipped below 20% for the first time in 2021, and as of 2022, the overall cigarette smoking rate stood at 17.7%, a decrease of 17.4 percentage points, or roughly 49.6%, compared to 1998. That kind of near-halving over roughly two decades is rare among large economies.
The gap between men and women remains wide even as overall numbers fall. As of 2024, South Korea had approximately 8.1 million current smokers, representing an adult current smoking prevalence of 17.6%, with the prevalence among adult males at 30.2% compared to 5.1% among adult females. Recent policy moves have kept pressure on the trend, including expanded smoke-free zones near schools introduced in August 2024.
Brazil
Brazil’s transformation is one of the most dramatic examples anywhere in the world, playing out over more than three decades. According to data from Vigitel, 9.3% of Brazilian adults smoked in 2023, compared to 34.8% in 1989. That represents a decline of roughly three quarters in the share of the population that smokes.
The shift didn’t happen by accident. This decline reflects decades of public health campaigns and legal restrictions, following Brazil’s 2005 ratification of the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which provided an international basis for its policies. Progress hasn’t been perfectly linear, though, since in 2024, a slight increase to 11.6% was observed, highlighting challenges such as the use of e-cigarettes, which have been banned since 2009.
India
India’s story stands out for the sheer scale of the drop relative to where the country started. Aggregated national data show a decline from over half of the population using tobacco products around the turn of the century down to roughly a fifth today, one of the steepest reductions recorded among the world’s most populous nations. India recorded the largest reduction from 55.8% to 21.8%, a drop of roughly 34 percentage points.
Regional data from the World Health Organization backs up the broader pattern across South and Southeast Asia. South-East Asia, once the world’s hotspot, saw prevalence among men nearly halved, from 70% in 2000 to 37% in 2024. Given India’s population size, even modest percentage-point shifts translate into tens of millions of people no longer using tobacco.
United States
The United States offers one of the longest-running declines on this list, stretching back to the mid-1960s when cigarette use peaked among American adults. Cigarette smoking has declined significantly in the United States over the past several decades, but it remains one of the leading causes of preventable death. The scale of that ongoing harm is still considerable even as prevalence keeps falling.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, smoking and exposure to secondhand smoke contribute to roughly one in five deaths nationwide each year. Regional disparities remain sharp within the country, too. West Virginia has the highest smoking rate in the country, with 20.4% of adults reporting that they smoke, while Kentucky follows at 17.6% and Tennessee ranks third at 17.0%. Those Appalachian numbers stand in contrast to the national trajectory, which continues to point steadily downward.
The bigger picture
Taken together, these eight countries show that dramatic declines in smoking rarely follow a single formula. Sweden and Norway leaned on smokeless alternatives rooted in local tradition, New Zealand and the United Kingdom rode a wave of vaping adoption, while South Korea, Brazil, India, and the United States relied more heavily on taxation, advertising restrictions, and sustained public health campaigns spanning decades. What connects them isn’t the method so much as the consistency, since none of these shifts happened overnight, and each required years of policy follow-through to show up in the data. Globally, tobacco use has fallen from 1.38 billion users in 2000 to 1.2 billion in 2024, a reminder that even modest national gains add up when sustained long enough.
