2.5 million people in the US have schizophrenia, which is about 1% of the population.

Approx. 23% of the general population smokes, but those who have a serious mental illness show rates of 45% or more, with 70-90% common among people with schizophrenia.

Essentially that means nearly half of all cigarettes sold in the US are sold to people with mental illness and people with schizophrenia are particularly vulnerable to nicotine addiction.

In the US alone, smoking causes more than 440,000 people to die prematurely each year due to nicotine addiction...and another 53,000 from secondhand smoke.

Whew. Amazing. I just finished a paper on this topic for my grad level addictions class and was pretty blown away (no pun intended) by those statistics.