SALT LAKE CITY — A new research study has named the states most and least addicted to nicotine and Utah was revealed as the third least addicted state.
Nicotine dependence, or tobacco addiction, occurs when someone cannot stop using nicotine despite a want to quit. In the U.S., smoking is responsible for more than 480,000 deaths each year. Snuzzer.comcommissioned the study to calculate their rankings based on factors like smoking rates in the general population, high school e-cigarette rates, and quit attempts.
Those factors were derived from sources like americashealthrankings.org, CDC data on smoking, and tobacco trends followed by Lung.org.
According to the findings, Utah is the third least dependent state on nicotine receiving a reliance score of 48.7 out of 100. That ranking was largely driven by the Beehive State's lowest proportion of smoking among the general population in the U.S. at just 6.7%.
California ranked as the least nicotine-addicted state largely because only 6.6% of high school students in the state use tobacco and just 3% of adults use e-cigarettes. Connecticut came in just before Utah as second in the rankings.
The researchers say that only 9.5% of high school students use tobacco while e-cigarette usage is low in the state at 6.1%.
Washington and Maryland filled out the top five of the rankings. While West Virginia, Louisiana, Alaska, Kentucky, and Arkansas were the top 5 of most nicotine-addicted states.
