DID many smokers stop smoking last Saturday? And have many stayed off the cigarettes since then?

For the last 11 years the month of October has been declared “Stoptober”.

It is an international anti-smoking campaign to encourage smokers to go without tobacco from October 1 to October 28 – in the hope that they won’t resume on October 29.

The chances of quitting for good are much higher in someone who has stayed off cigarettes for four consecutive weeks.

Of course cigarettes are highly addictive, thanks not just to the properties of nicotine but to some of the other ingredients the tobacco manufacturers add, in order to make quitting as hard as possible.

Giving up smoking can be as difficult as giving up heroin.

But many manage to do it. In 1970, 55 per cent of men and 44 per cent of women smoked cigarettes. By 2021 this was down to 15.5 per cent of men and 14 per cent of women.

Some will have given up and others will be dead. It is the single biggest cause of preventable illness and early death.

Perhaps you could say that some will have stopped themselves from smoking and others will have topped themselves by smoking.

Would-be quitters who don’t make it through Stoptober will soon have other opportunities to try.

If they make a new year’s resolution to stop and fail then they can always try again on National No Smoking Day on March 8. Then on May 31 it is World No Tobacco Day – an international no-smoking day.

And of course there have been plenty of measures over the last 50 years to discourage smoking, or at least to inconvenience smokers in various ways.

It was in 1951 that a scientist called Professor Sir Richard Doll published research linking smoking with lung cancer, but it wasn’t widely reported.

However in 1971 cigarette manufacturers agreed to put health warnings on packets.

Later came the ban on cigarette advertising. And in 2007 the minimum age at which you can buy cigarettes in England was raised from 16 to 18, while smoking was also banned in indoor public places such as pubs and restaurants – after Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland had done so successfully.

It spared non-smoking pubgoers from an evening of passive smoking. Now they’ve cleared the air inside pubs, cleaning and insurance costs are lower, and most pubs will have refugee smokers standing outside in the rain or the cold. That must surely have encouraged at least some to stop.

Vaping has proved a popular and effective, if not entirely risk-free, means of weaning smokers off the real things.

And for the last five years cigarettes can only be sold in plain, brown packaging with larger health warnings and grisly pictures of diseased lungs on the front.

Smoking is linked to a host of potentially deadly illnesses, such as many cancers, heart disease and bronchitis. My grandmother was one of eight siblings and outlived all of them, dying at the age of 94. And she was the only one who never smoked.

Lung cancer is of course the worst effect of smoking. Around 86 per cent of lung cancer deaths in the UK are caused by tobacco smoking.

Britain has done well in reducing this. In 1950 the UK had one of the highest rates of lung cancer in the world. The annual number of deaths from lung cancer in 2000 was half of what it was in 1965.

There will no doubt be predictable complaints about the “nanny state” lecturing people about their lifestyles, and arguments that we should be free to eat, drink or smoke ourselves to death if we want to.

But just as one person’s smoking is another person’s passive smoking, so one person’s ill health is a drain on everyone’s National Health Service.

Studies from Cancer Research UK show that if smoking rates fell by another five per cent, almost 100,000 cases of smoking-related disease would be avoided over the next 20 years, saving £67 million a year in health and social care costs.

Of course tobacco is not the only harmful substance in the world, and many others have to be treated by the NHS.

But their dangers are less clear-cut. There is some disputed evidence that moderate drinking is better than no drinking at all.

Attention is being paid to the possible medicinal properties of cannabis. The one definite benefit of drugs is that they have taught a whole generation about metric measurements.

But there is no case for smoking at all. I’m glad every day that I never took it up.