Where Data Tells the Story
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The world has fewer tobacco users today than it did 25 years ago.
Though it’s not dramatically fewer.
The reduction took three decades of public health effort, international treaty enforcement, legislative action, and billions in cessation program funding to achieve.
Using data from the WHO Global Report, the infographic above shows the trends in the global number of tobacco users (millions) aged 15 years and older
The 135 million reduction in the number of global tobacco users between 2000 and 2025 occurred while the world population grew by approximately 2.1 billion people.
On a population-adjusted basis, accounting for how many more people are potentially eligible to use tobacco, the decline in prevalence rates is considerably greater than the raw user numbers suggest.
The world added billions of people and still reduced the number of tobacco users in absolute terms.
It is also a number that has 1,227 million on the wrong side of it.
The WHO projects that global tobacco users will reach 1,197 million by 2030, meaning that three more decades of effort under current policy trajectories will produce an additional reduction of approximately 30 million.
The pace of decline is slowing, and two regions are actively bucking it: Africa and the EMR.