Let’s pretend for a moment that we live in a world that’s never known of cigarettes or anything tobacco related.
Now let’s say some guy in the year 2014 invents the cigarette and he takes it to a group of researchers to figure out if they are safe or not.
It wouldn’t take them very long at all to come to the conclusion that this cigarette thing is dangerous, right?
Right. Actually, it’s been known for a long time that cigs were dangerous. They were called 'coffin nails" since the 1880’s*
A solid provable link between cigs and lung cancer took a while, yes, but much of that was due to the enormous power of Big Tobacco.
*Origin of cigarette phrased nailed down – Loveland Reporter-Herald
Ever been on a campout, sitting around a campfire? It doesn’t take much to realize that inhaling smoke is bad for you.
Welll, Sir Walter Raleigh first brought Virginias tobacco back to England about 1580, and King James wrote a A Counterblaste to Tobacco in 1604, in which he called it “harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs”.
So it only took about 25 years for the dangers of smoking to be recognized by the highest government authority. And that in Shakespearean England, without much science or researchers.
Within a year, there would be clinical case studies showing the pulmonary and cardiovascular effects. The full risks would not be appreciated for a few decades, since (IIRC) the type of lung cancer caused by smoking grows slowly. Thus, epidemiologists won’t see increased cancer rates until there is a large population of people who have been smoking for ~20 years.
Smoke is comprised of airborne particles of various sizes. Airborne particulate matter (PM) less than 2.5 microns in diameter is referred to as PM[sub]2.5[/sub], and has long been recognized as a public health hazard because it gets deep down into the recesses of your lungs and parks there, releasing whatever toxins it might possess into your bloodstream as well as interfering with the normal gas exchange process. Combustion-generated smoke is already known to contain a whole array of toxic compounds, and so if someone in 2014 started selling a product that generated dense clouds of smoke for the express purpose of inhalation, it seems likely it would be outlawed as fast as “synthetic marijuana” and “bath salts” were - even if it wasn’t highly addictive.
I read A Counterblaste to Tobacco in high school, and was quite surprised by it. It would seem that, yes, it really is that obvious that smoking is a bad idea.
Originally posted by Bob Newheart:
They were singing about the evils of cigarettes in the 1940s.
Except – there were plenty of authorities in early modern Europe who thought it was equally obvious that tobacco was good for you. King James happens to have been right, but I suspect it was more by accident than observation. (Keep in mind, this is the same King James who thought he had an abundance of evidence that witches existed and were a menace to society.)
It’s long been established that most fire victims die from smoke inhalation, and survivors often have long-term damage from residues in their respiratory system. Tobacco smoke would be examined, and shown to contain the same toxins, in a matter of days.
Said subject from the past: OK, I have my cigarette burning. Do you scientists want to try it out?
Scientist 1: Nope, we are good.
Younger, hotter, female scientist #2: Sure, that sounds fun!
Bow-chicka-wow-wow. Titties, booze, video.
People are stupid.
I think it’s difficult to look at some of the older claims that cigarettes are harmful and not wonder how well justified they were. It turns out they were right, but that doesn’t actually prove they had good reason to be confident based on what they had actually done/
It took some extra time to establish through modern medical research that cigarettes are harmful to health because they damage the health in so many ways. Prior to this research, it was common to include all sorts of internal checks in the research to guard against things like unnoticed correlations. For example, in research about whether electromagnetic radiation from power lines, you’d have to account for the fact that the same people were likely to have to work nasty dangerous jobs and also live right under power lines. The typical health hazard has a narrow range of effects targeting a narrow range of body parts or systems. Cigarettes defied this by causing so many kinds of health damage. Lung cancer? Good theory, they thought, but then they tried to rule out the lung cancer being caused by some other thing by looking at rates of cancer in other organs, and found that all elevated too (cigarettes increase the risk of nearly every kind of cancer there is). And it turns out that cigarettes kill way more people by making the already fairly common heart disease just somewhat more common. Because the health impacts were so widely spread, this confused the issue for a while.
Whether cigarettes would be quickly recognized as a risk today would depend on whether this wisdom got learned in some other way, given that it wouldn’t have been learned decades ago through the study of cigarettes.
Also, cigarette damage in humans takes years to show up.
If they showed up unannounced today…hmmm. Is pot also legal in your world?
Cigs might be marketed as the “smoke without getting busted!” choice.
But even so…people are stupid.
How long have people been dying from booze?
No matter how many researchers say that it is bad…if it changes how humans perceive reality, there will be a market for it.
If tobacco cigarettes were “invented” today, they’d be put on the Schedule I list. Although people would be unlikely to be interested in them, since they don’t even get you high.