Are people smoking more cigarettes during the pandemic? It depends who you ask

Earlier this year, the Marlboro man announced he was making a comeback.

Well, to be clear, Altria Group Inc., which makes Marlboros, released the news that the trend of declining cigarette sales, which it has experienced for decades, has come to an end, likely due to COVID-19.

On the face of it, this is unsurprising news, given that we’ve all heard that people are consuming more cannabis and drinking more alcohol to cope with boredom, stress and loneliness with their drug of choice.

“I don’t have empirical data,” says Natacha Duke, a registered psychotherapist with Cleveland Clinic Canada and Bhatia Psychology Group. “But I can say from my clinical experience that smoking has increased, the same way that alcohol use and problematic eating behaviour has increased during the pandemic, as well as other types of habits that might not be best for our health.

“I think it’s partly due to this sense of Groundhog Day, especially now that it’s almost a year into this,” she continues. “The boredom is real.”

That said, the pandemic hasn’t necessarily affected smoking rates in a uniform and predictable way around the world. In the United Kingdom, it looks as if people went the other way, with record numbers of people quitting smoking in 2020, some of whom were motivated by concerns over lung damage and negative COVID-19 outcomes.

So which way are Canadians going? Well, we don’t have all the numbers yet. One Canadian survey on tobacco was delayed due to the pandemic and another, more general, community health survey has been completed, but we won’t see the results until spring.

While we wait, there are two sets of data that might give us a clue. The first is a Statistics Canada survey that offers a snapshot of how people were coping at the outset of the pandemic: late March and early April 2020. Canadians were polled about changes in their tobacco consumption and three per cent reported they were smoking more, but three per cent said they were smoking less. So is it a wash?

“The thing about COVID-19 is that it really depends on when you do the survey,” says David Hammond, professor and university research chair at the School of Public Health at the University of Waterloo. “In 2020, in most parts of Canada, basically it was hard lockdowns in March and April and then opening in the summer, and then back to hard lockdowns again towards the end of the year, so it matters when people tried to measure consumption.”

The Retail Commodity Survey from Statistics Canada gives us a wider lens, in that it offers tobacco sales from most of 2020, which can be compared with 2019’s numbers. Tobacco sales are up for 2020, but we should be cautious about making too much of that, given that these aren’t the numbers most researchers use. Plus, there are all sorts of reasons consumption could appear higher at certain points, including switching to cigarettes from vapes, stockpiling and the fact that the pandemic changed the way a lot of people shop, especially for drugs like tobacco, alcohol and cannabis.

“Legal cannabis sales look to have increased, but one question is ‘What’s happening to illegal sales?’” says Hammond. “COVID-19 may have given a big boost to legal cannabis stores, since maybe people didn’t want to go meet some dude in the alley, especially once retailers were allowed to ship directly to consumers.”

Since a lot of people buy their cigarettes from the “unregulated” market (also called counterfeit cigarettes, which are cheaper), the cannabis sales hypothesis might be applicable to tobacco as well. People might have found contraband sources cut off or too inconvenient during the lockdowns. There are a lot of factors complicating things or, as Hammond says, “the short, easy answer is that there’s no short, easy answer.”

There are solutions for people looking to curb their use, however. Duke suggests smokers seek out the help of a therapist or call the Smoker’s Helpline, which has a lot of great resources. And Duke says it’s not just boredom that is causing a range of problematic behaviours, since stress, anxiety and loneliness are other significant factors that the pandemic is exacerbating.

If you’ve ever read Allen Carr’s “Easy Way to Stop Smoking” though, you know that cigarettes only give the illusion of reducing stress. Cigarettes actually feed tension and anxiety and make the problems worse. So, instead of lighting up, Duke suggests a little soul-searching.

“I think it’s really important right now to pause and identify and acknowledge what you’re feeling, whether you are bored or lonely or anxious or stressed,” she advises. “If we don’t acknowledge what we’re feeling, we can’t take steps to improve it in healthy ways and think about some healthier coping strategies.”

And, finally, to wrap up this complicated story, we leave you with a little good news on the smoking front. Although the national surveys aren’t complete, Hammond says that the University of Waterloo’s research indicates one specific group is smoking less since the pandemic began: adolescents.

“As part of our research, we’ve done surveys with youth every year for four years,” says Hammond. “And our data suggests that smoking among young people has continued to decline at a similar rate as in previous years, so we think that there could be some real differences between young people and adult smokers.”

The reason? It could be as simple as the fact that teen smoking is social and, of late, they’ve had a lot less unsupervised social time. This could have a big impact on public health in the future if these adolescents never take up smoking at all.

A silver lining? Maybe. There are no short easy answers, but it’s certainly a possibility.