72% of adult smokers regret ever starting to smoke, according to the 2014 Tobacco Products and Risk Perceptions Survey — the most recent nationally representative US measurement. The finding is not an outlier: the International Tobacco Control 4-Country Survey (2002, N>8,000) found 91% of US smokers would not have started if they could do it again, Cancer Research UK’s YouGov survey (2012, N=1,746) found 85% of UK smokers and ex-smokers wished they’d never started, and Gallup (2012) found 88%. The 72% Sanders-Jackson figure is the most conservative because it sampled only current smokers, excludes ex-smokers (who often report even higher regret), and used the most rigorous nationally representative methodology. All four data points converge: regret about starting is the dominant experience of adult smokers.
The inaction side of this decision has no direct survey counterpart. No published study has asked never-smokers whether they regret not having smoked — the construct is essentially absent from the tobacco-regret literature because researchers have no theoretical reason to expect a meaningful response. Nicotine addiction generates regret by trapping users in a habit they wish they had never started; the mechanism requires having started in the first place. Among the roughly 57% of US adults who have never smoked (2022 NHIS), the published literature documents no cohort wishing they had taken up the habit. A 2% upper-bound inaction rate is used here as a conservative placeholder, not a measured figure.
Under Gilovich and Medvec’s temporal regret framework, action regrets tend to fade over time while inaction regrets grow — making most long-horizon regret-pairs favour the inaction side. Smoking inverts this pattern almost uniquely. Nicotine addiction is self-sustaining: the continued physical urge to smoke, combined with repeated failed quit attempts (only 8.8% of US smokers who try to quit succeed in a given year, per CDC 2022), keeps action-side regret elevated and unresolvable for decades. The regret gap here — approximately 70 percentage points — is among the largest observed in bilateral regret research, and is driven not by forgetting but by the impossibility of undoing the addiction that the action created.