Cigarettes

Today cigarettes are mostly famous for being highly addictive, and hugely dangerous (although many of us still can't help admitting that a person does look awfully cool when they're smoking one). And it's common knowledge that the tobacco industry had to pay out a huge settlement in 1998 to make up for having covered up their knowledge about the dangers of cigarette smoking for most of the Twentieth Century.

But if you've been alive for more than a few decades as I have been, or if you've studied a little history even, maybe you've noticed that talking about the dangers of smoking is not exactly a new thing. Maybe you've seen ads like this one from 1930, which mention the irritating effects of cigarette smoke:



Or this one from 1935 which touts how great Camel cigarettes are, compared with those others that "get your wind":



Perhaps you've read that cigarettes used to be called coffin nails, or that an old Australian nickname for them was gaspers. Perhaps you've wondered: How long have people actually known that cigarettes are bad for you?

It was after the automation of the cigarette-rolling industry in the 1880's led to a reduction in prices, that cigarette smoking first began to grow popular. There is evidence to suggest however, that the tobacco used in those first early cigarettes was coarse and rough-tasting, so that smokers probably did not inhale. Smoking without inhaling, while not a good thing, is a less dangerous way of smoking.

It was Dr. Isaac Adler, in his book Primary Malignant Growths of the Lung a Bronchi, who first made an anecdotal connection between cigarettes and lung cancer. The first actual research proving the link, wasn't published until 1929, however. And by then cigarette makers had consolidated their place at the center of American society. Cigarettes were given away free to soldiers serving overseas during World War I. And in 1929, the publicist Edward Bernays won what is probably the biggest public relations triumph in history, when he made the connection between smoking and women's liberation, by persuading a group of debutantes to march in the New York City Easter Parade, smoking their torches of freedom.



Further research on the dangers of smoking came only slowly. In 1950, British researcher Richard Doll published his study showing links between smoking and lung cancer and heart disease. Following in 1956, convincing proof of that link was shown by the British Doctor's Study. Public opinion in America began to move gradually away from smoking after that, but even so, the move was a slow one.

As near as I can tell, the reason for that is twofold: First of all, it has been shown by documented proof that the tobacco industry actively hid evidence that smoking cigarettes is dangerous for many years. In addition though, I think it was the anti-smoking forces themselves, who helped keep smoking popular.

The anti-smoking movement, you understand, began in the 1830's, before there was any evidence at all that smoking was dangerous. Activists from the American prohibition movement spoke out against smoking for its role in "creating a morbid or diseased thirst" which only liquor could quench. The Prussian government made a law saying smokers had to shield their cigars behind a wire mesh contraption, to keep sparks from falling on the skirts of ladies nearby. Into the Twentieth Century, cigarette the powers that be said that smoking was "unladylike". They condemned the flappers of the 1920's for smoking in the street, as well as for other such supposedly unladylike behaviors as shortening their skirts and allowing boys to kiss them on dates.

I don't think it's a stretch to say that this kind of condemnation probably encouraged people to smoke instead of stopping them. It's like the anti-drug films our teachers used to make us watch in class in the 1970's, that kept telling us smoking a single joint was going to turn us into strung-out heroin abusers or LSD trippers flying out of ten-story windows, long after most of us had actually tried marijuana and found out differently.



Scare tactics don't really work so well unless they're connected up with some real facts. Sometimes they don't work very well even if there are some facts behind them, because the facts end up taking a back seat to the overblown hype. A lot of the kids I went to school with went on to try cocaine, and a lot of the other BIG, TERRIBLE DRUGS we were all warned about, because so many of the warnings we were given were so obviously dumb, that they stopped taking any of them seriously.

I suspect the same thing happened with cigarettes. After years of stuffy old ladies saying dumb things, like "no lady smokes", smoking came to be seen as cool, and emancipated. Men smoked to look "manly", and women smoked to keep up with them, and finally you end up with so much smoking going on that I imagine the average room must have smelled like those horrid designated Smokers' Rooms that you're sometimes unlucky enough to have to rent when you show up too late at the Holiday Inn Express and all the good rooms have taken.



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