When will our anti-smoking campaign cease?

At present, we still have a lot of smokers standing around outside having a puff. In order to stamp that out, various governments throw gobfulls of money at anti-smoking campaigns. We have ads on the TV every day. We have Quit lines. We probably have Clockwork Orange type groups running around snatching smokers from alleys and brainwashing them into giving up.

When will it no longer be worth bothering with all this?

After all, there will come a point where the costs of throwing money at groups to stop people smoking will outweight the benefits of doing so.

As a proportion of the population, those that smoke are continuing to drop. Don't ask me what the numbers are today - go google it yourself and find out. But let's say that 50% smoked when we were kids, and it is now down to 30%. A big chunk of that drop was achieved through fairly costless means - banning the advertising of cigarettes, the odd ad in the paper and a huge increase in tobacco taxes.

But those measures only got rid of the low hanging fruit - those that found it easy to quit. More and more money now has to be thrown at actively making people give up, like setting up a QUIT phone line and staffing it 24x7. And the cost of advertising it.

Let's say it currently costs $1000 to entice a smoker to give up, and the benefit is $10,000 in savings in health costs etc.

What will happen when we are down to say 20% of the population smoking? I predict that the cost to make the next tranche quit will increase, and it will increase quite quickly. It might cost $2000 to make the next lot quit, and then when we get to 15% smokers, it might cost $5000 per smoker, and then it might hit $10,000 when we get to say 12%.

It could conceivably cost $50,000 per person to convert smokers when we hit the 10% level. Do we just call it quits at that point and say "enough is enough, the money can be better spent on prostate cancer or obesity or breast cancer". Or do we just carry on regardless, because a bureacracy has now been put in place that is totally dependent on QUIT funding to stay operational?

My guess is that the QUIT campaign will be with us for the rest of our lives, even if the proportion of those that smoke falls to 1% in the next 20 years. Killing Qangos is just too hard for most governments to contemplate, and imagine the outcry if any government axed an anti-smoking campaign. It would be like coming out and saying that you don't support motherhood. Political trauma.

Might be a good career to be had in a place like that. Sounds like a nice gravy train.