Rolling Paper - Consumption

Consumption

In the United States, Tobacconist Magazine has called roll-your-own (RYO) the tobacco industry's fastest growing segment. It estimates that 2-4% of US cigarette smokers, or approximately 2.6 million people, make their own cigarettes. Many of these smokers have switched in response to increasingly high taxes on manufactured cigarettes.

In 2000, a Canadian government survey estimated that 9% of Canada's six million cigarette smokers smoked hand-rolled cigarettes "sometimes or most of the time", 7% smoked roll-your-owns "exclusively", and over 90% of rolling papers sold in Canada were for tobacco consumption. A more recent 2009 study has shown that approximately 925,000 Canadians roll their own cigarettes.

According to The Publican, "Low price RYO has seen an astonishing rise of 175 per cent in as cigarette smokers look for cheaper alternatives and to control the size of their smoke". Britain's National Health Service has reported that roll-your-own use has more than doubled since 1990, from 11% to 24%. Many of these smokers apparently believe that hand rolled cigarettes are healthier than manufactured products.

In Thailand, roll-your-own smokers have long exceeded those for manufactured brands; the cheaper papers without gum are kept constantly between the fingers during a smoke there. New Zealand reported in 2005 that: The ratio of roll-your-own to manufactured or tailor-made cigarettes consumed by New Zealanders has risen over (at least) the past decade, perhaps reflecting price differences between these products, and currently approaching 50 percent overall.