This amounts to more than 730,000 new smokers each year.

However, declining rate has been offset each year with the addition of about one million new young American smokers.

The global tobacco companies insist that they are not attempting to recruit new smokers in Asia.

Tobacco companies spend $157 million a year on advertising to attract new smokers.

Moreover, since teen-age smoking rates are particularly sensitive to price, the number of new smokers would fall dramatically.

Tobacco companies have long known that they need to lasso their new smokers at a very early age.

But youngsters are more important as a long-term source of new smokers.

After all, children under eighteen account for two-thirds of all new smokers.

"They are an end run around the regular cigarette to lure new smokers," he says.

But 80% of new smokers are young people under the age of 18.