The Next 50 Years

The Surgeon General has released “The Next 50 Years,” an inspirational new video on ending the tobacco epidemic

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For more than fifty years, the Surgeon General has been reporting about the dangers of smoking and tobacco use. The findings have spurred many of us to help smokers quit, clear the air of secondhand smoke, and keep young people from starting in the first place.

We know the strategies that work and now we have an historic opportunity to end the tobacco epidemic. If we work together, we can save millions of lives.

To reflect on all the work that has been done, and remind us of the road ahead, we have developed and releasedThe Next 50 Years. This video can help you raise awareness and draw attention to the important work that remains to be done in tobacco control. Smoking has been the number-one cause of preventable death and disease in this country for decades. If we could eliminate tobacco use entirely, the results would be staggering:

We would prevent nearly half a million premature deaths each year.
We would save the lives of 5.6 million children alive today who would die prematurely because of smoking.
58 million Americans still exposed to secondhand smoke would breathe more freely.
We would prevent one out of three cancer deaths in this country.