Just like one man is smoking. Smoking is not essential for living. If you don’t smoke… Just like we don’t smoke. That does not mean we are dying. It is an anartha (unwanted habit). But anyone who has learned this smoking, he cannot stop it. Anartha. The result of bhajana will be substantiated when anartha-nivrittih syat, he’s no more interested with some unwanted things. We have practiced so many unwanted things.

Srimad-Bhagavatam 1.2.18
by His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada
Calcutta, September 26, 1974
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Tobacco atlas: country by country

The Guardian — Almost 6m people were killed by tobacco use in 2011 according to the latest data released this week. How do countries compare for cigarette consumption and which countries have the highest pecentage of smokers?
• Get the data
• Explore the map

A devastating audit of the tobacco industry has been published showing that despite nearly 50m deaths in the last century due to tobacco use, the industry is gaining bigger profits than ever before.

Almost 6m people died in 2011 due to tobacco use, with around 80% of the deaths occuring in low and middle-income countries according to the tobacco atlas published by the American Cancer Society and World Lung Foundation. The combined profits of the six leading tobacco companies in 2010 was equal to the combined profits of Coca-Cola, Microsoft, and McDonald’s in the same year. Simon Bowers writes:

Revenues from global tobacco sales are estimated to be close to $500bn (£316bn), generating combined profits for the six largest firms of $35.1bn – more than $1,100 a second.

Much of this profit is ultimately channelled to pension and insurance investors in the UK – British American Tobacco and Imperial are two of the largest companies listed on the London stock market.

The destructive effects of passive smoking have also been highlighted in the report – an estimated 600,000 people died of passive smoking in 2011, of which 75% were women and children.

Click here to see the full interactive map

The tobacco atlas provides data for a number of key indicators, some of which we have mapped on a Google fusion map. You can explore it by clicking on the image above and by using the drop down indicators you can see cigarette consumption by country and the illicit share of the cigarette market as well as the percentage of males, females and youth smoking.

The bar chart above shows that China was the biggest tobacco producer in 2009 with Brazil and India following behind. Further tobacco industry indicators such as tobacco area harvested, cigarette prices per pack and the percentage change in tobacco production by country can be found in the spreadsheet to download. Below are some of the findings of the report:

• More than 43 trillion cigarettes have been smoked in the last ten years
• Tobacco use causes 1.2m deaths annually in China and is the number one killer of the country. The report findings state that this is expected to rise to 3.5m deaths annually by the year 2030
• Tobacco use is responsible for the greatest proportion of male deaths in Turkey and Kazakhstan at 38% and 35% respectively
• The greatest proportion of female deaths due to tobacco use were in the Maldives and the United States at 25% and 23% respectively.

We have gathered some of the key indicators by country in the table below. The full data including more detailed tobacco industry and the number of deaths due to tobacco by country can be found in the downloadable spreadsheet . What can you do with the data?

• This article was corrected on 23 March 2012 because it named Papau New Guinea, Rwanda and Luxembourg as the biggestest tobacco producers in 2009.

Data summary

Tobacco atlas indicators by countryClick heading to sort table. Download this data