A new research by the government of the U.S. has revealed that elevated smoking levels still prevail among a few groups, even after achieving strong success rate in eliminating smoking from the country. The Associate Director for Health Equity in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Office on Smoking and Health, Bridgette Garrett, stated that despite a decrease in the overall rate of smoking, variations have been noted among racial and ethnic groups and within subgroups.

She added that the solution is to move beyond the wide racial and ethnic groups and concentrate on adoption of approaches that are known to be successful in alleviating the use of tobacco in subgroups, where smoking rate is still high. Looking at whites and blacks together, the rate of smoking declined from 28% to 25% from the period 2002-2005 to 2010-2013.

However, a noteworthy decrease was noted among Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders in the United States, with smoking rates declining from 31% to 23%. However, the performance of American Indians and Alaska Natives was not quite satisfactory because their smoking rate on the contrary increased from 37% to 29%. Meanwhile, a decline from 14.5% to 11% was seen in the overall smoking rate among Asian-Americans.

But within this category, Asian Indians, Chinese and Japanese subgroups were on the lower side, while Filipinos, Vietnamese and Koreans were on the higher end of smoking rates. Koreans were identified with the highest smoking rate of 20%. While overall smoking rate for U.S. Hispanics dropped from 24% to 20%, there were wide variations within the subgroups.

The highest rate of smoking of 28.5% was prevalent among Puerto Ricans. "We know smoke-free policies, hard-hitting media campaigns, higher prices for tobacco products, and promotion of cessation treatment in clinical settings are proven to reduce tobacco product use”, said the Director of the CDC's Office on Smoking and Health, Corinne Graffunder.