Jump to full article: Times Of London (uk), 2009-09-30
Author: Sam Lister, Health Editor
Intro: More than one in four adult smokers now use pouch tobacco and roll-up cigarettes, with a particularly sharp rise in the proportion of women users, research shows.
Analysis of smoking habits in England suggests a cultural shift in the use of tobacco, with one in five white-collar professionals who smoke now using roll-ups rather than conventional cigarettes.
While roll-ups may once have been the habit of the working man and the spit and sawdust pub, their use among women has risen sharply in recent years.
In 1990 just one in 50 female smokers used hand-rolled tobacco, compared with one in five in 2007.
The trend, revealed in Statistics on Smoking in England 2009, was described as partly a cultural shift -- with roll-up smoking less stigmatised and more "hip" among the middle-classes -- and partly economic, with rolling tobacco significantly cheaper as it has not been subject to severe tax rises placed on other forms of smoking.
Some famous smokers of roll-ups include the actresses Kate Winslet, Emma Thompson and Helena Bonham-Carter.
The report, compiled by the NHS Information Centre and published yesterday, also shows that the number of people aged 35 and over admitted to hospital for smoking-related diseases has risen by a fifth since 1997, from 1.2 million to 1.4 million.
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