Because of the enormous body of evidence linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer and heart disease, there are endless statistics on the impact of smoking, on the results when you quit smoking, on secondhand smoke, smoking while pregnant, etc.
Sometimes the numbers get tiresome, but one figure that jumps off a page from a Centers for Disease Control (CDC) study is the calculation that smoking will shortens life spans for Americans by an average of thirteen to fourteen years. This figure was generated by an in-depth study of health and death statistics in the United States for the period 1995 – 1999.