The average American smoker shoves about 22 death sticks into their mouth each day. That’s substantial. Enough to kill you at an early age. But, according to new data on smoking behavior across the world collected by researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington and published on a snazzy interactive site, no other country could quite match the average performance of the tobacco fiends in Suriname.
Though less than 10 percent of the 534,541 people in the former Dutch colony on the northeastern coast of South America smoke (Papua New Guinea, Greece, and Macedonia lead the world with the highest rates), daily users there remain a freakishly addicted crew. An average smoker there consumes 40,000 cigarettes annually. (Sudan trails way behind at 21,000.) That’s more than 109 cigarettes, or five packs, a day.
At six minutes to consume a cigarette, that’s a full-time job, plus another two or so hours of overtime. And the average has a range, which extends all the way up to 180,000 cigarettes a year. Not sure how that’s physically possible. Perhaps the cigarettes are extremely tiny. Whatever the case, that’s some seriously pious tobacco worship.
