Finland: One in Five 16-year-olds Smokes

Source from:  YLE24 (fi)  10/25/2012

Smoking has become less prevalent in Finland in recent years. Men of working age, in particular, have started lighting up less over the past decade. According to the THL, a third of Finnish men smoked in the 1980s, but now this is true for about 20 percent. Cigarettes have also fallen out of vogue with women—today, about 15 percent of them smoke.

A whopping 19 percent of Finnish 16-year-olds light up, but despite this the number of underage smokers is still down on previous years. The majority of smokers—58 percent—say they want to quit. But about 15 percent of men and 11 percent of women who smoke say they do not wish for a cigarette-free life. A change to tobacco legislation in 1995 introduced restrictions to smoking at the work place. According to the THL, non-smokers are now far less exposed to tobacco fumes at work than they were ten years ago. In the 1980s, nearly half of men and almost a third of women encountered smoke at work, but now less than 10 percent of non-smokers run into tobacco fumes in the work environment. Enditem