ers. In actual fact, however, the proportion of female smokers has not increased; it has just dropped at a lower rate than that for males. A more plausible explanation for the narrowing of the gap is likely that the population of female smokers in the mid 1960s was already comprised primarily of the high risk groups the young, the less well educated, and the economically poor, while the population of male smokers included large numbers of people not in these risk groups. The anti smoking campaigns, thus, likely found more fertile ground among the male smokers who were not in the high risk groups, than it did among the high risk groups within either sex classification.
A similar phenomenon likely explains the higher proportion of smokers found among blacks. Differences in birth rates mean that proportionately more young people are included in the black population than is true of either whites or Asians in the United States, and both the less well educated and the economically poor are also found n higher proportions amon
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