I was reading a book named Freaknomics and it made me think
about a question which intrigued me for a long time. What is the worth of
smoking a cigarette? This made me do this small/redundant/junk research. I chose
to consider Kerala as my research area, as only Kerala can boast about its
health and less disparity of income. Yea, also proud about it J
So the first thing that I wanted to do was how I can
attribute the value of life a person lost on smoking a cigarette. I had to find
an equation for which input was number of cigarettes and the output was minutes/hours
of life. The life expectancy in Kerala is 74. Number of death in Kerala during
2009 as per the official record is 232020 (Don’t ask me whether they killed
someone to make it a round figure). Using the same record I found out that out
of this 93.29% died at the age of 30+. Also as the median age of a person
starting smoking is at the age of 30. I choose to consider only the age from 30
to 74 as the years of life. Now if we take the reason for death, the same
record gives a statistics as 7.2% from cancer and 27.66% from Heart attack. As
per a researcher * 20.1% of the total cancer is lung cancer. As probability of
a person who gets lung cancer is 2300% **higher than a person who does not
smoke, I neglect any lung cancer caused without smoking. So if we take all the
numbers we have a total of 232020 death in which 93.29% of death we are
actually interested in.
So the 44 years (74 – 30) if divided in the same proportion
as the proportion of cause of death. 7.2% total death is caused by cancer,
20.1% of this number is caused by lung cancer. So smoking-led lung cancer
constitutes 2.38% of total death by lung cancer. In the 27.66% of the heart
attack, 30% is due to smoking. So smoking via heart attack attributes 8.29% of
total death. So based on this total death by smoking is 2.38+ 8.29 = 10.67%. If
I divide the 44 years of life in this portion we get 4.69 years. So on an
average a smoker by smoking takes away 4.69 years of his life. Let is round it
of to 5 (As final stages of cancer and heart disease is not worth counting). So
an average smoker’s life expectancy is 69, still ahead of Indian life
expectancy.
The percapita income of Kerala is 63,000. So that means an
average smoker is denied 5* 63,000 Rs (Rs 315,000): of money. The average
cigarette smoked by an Asian is 14. So if we use this in the 39 years of his
life he might have smoked considering average price of 6Rs per cigarette the
total amount cost to 11,95,740. Now we will try to equate money with the
pleasure. I am defining a unit “Pleasure” to measure pleasure received in
smoking one cigarette. So one cigarette is worth one pleasure, so the cost of
each pleasure is 6 rupees so a smoker invests 11,95,740 Rs to get 199290 units
of pleasure. The amount denied to him (3,15,000) could have earned him 52500
units of pleasure. So subtracting this he will get only 146790 out of 199290. So a loss percentage of 26 happens
each time he trade for unit of pleasure. Now converting it back to money, for
each one rupee he actually makes a loss of 26 paise. No sane businessman will
be ready for such a business.
Now a counter argument can be from successful entrepreneur
claiming that smoking helped them in getting innovative ideas which made them
successful and there by earning more than they could have and thereby
offsetting or may be profiting by the act of cigarette smoking. This itself is
a complex problem and thus currently out of scope of this research.
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Good Bro.. may you research help other to quit smoking..!
ReplyDeleteAny how me gonna complete one year without cigarettes..!
DeleteCost-benefit analysis of smoking is one sided. It'll always be a loss for the economy, the person, and second hand smokers.
ReplyDeleteThere's also something called third-hand smoke, where a smoker contaminates a non-smoking areas with carcinogens accumulated while smoking. It's scary!