"Tobacco Use" chart in Briefing section of 10 March 2008 issue of Time: the map leaps out at me because it shows the big smoker states and it's basically the BRIC + the United States + New Core-ish Turkey and Indonesia. Old Core Germany and Gappish Bangladesh round out the top ten.
Smoking is becoming a New Core/Seam-heavy phenomenon--that living on the edge of modernity/life/whatever sense.
Thirty percent of the world's smokers are located in China, which obviously is over-represented. India's second to China in terms of percentage of men smoking (China is 55 percent and India is 33%). In both countries women smoke in the 4 percent range--a weird sort of sexism. In more sensitive America, 26 percent of men and 21 percent of women smoke--something to tout!
I imagine you find a higher concentration of American smokers in the lower and lower-middle-class ranges, and that you find immigrants more clustered in those categories, so we act more New Core-ish because we simply fit that profile across a big chunk of our population. It's why we tend to rank not as high as we want on various advanced nation scores.
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