# Two questions re pr-1964 smoking health hazard awareness **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [July 31, 2022, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/two-questions-re-pr-1964-smoking-health-hazard-awareness/968889 "2022-07-31T20:51:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Ziberian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/919ad9/32.png) [@Ziberian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ziberian)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2022, 7:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/two-questions-re-pr-1964-smoking-health-hazard-awareness/968889/21 "2022-08-01T07:47:12Z")
Children were discouraged from smoking, but a lot of people began smoking as young teenagers & that wasn’t considered a terrible thing, just a “bad habit”. Although people knew smoking wasn’t good for you, they didn’t know the details – lung cancer, etc. And I’m not sure they would have cared, because people simply had a very different view of life and mortality in those days. This was long before health & safety regulations were common. A lot of jobs were dangerous (see ‘no safety regulations’). Much of the medical care that extends lives today didn’t exist. There was zero focus on things like ‘life expectancy’, and the idea of exercising & eating to extend your life was practically unheard of. Against this background, risky behaviors like smoking just didn’t have the importance they do today. Very different world. ---
**Author:** ![3AxisCtrl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/3/ecd19e/32.png) [@3AxisCtrl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/3AxisCtrl)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2022, 9:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/two-questions-re-pr-1964-smoking-health-hazard-awareness/968889/22 "2022-08-01T09:11:09Z")
Kipling’s book _Captains Courageous_, published in 1897, includes a scene in which a spoiled rich kid wishes to impress a fishing boat captain by pulling a wad of cash from his pocket. He instead grabs a soggy package of cigarettes. The captain’s response: “Not lawful currency and bad for the lungs - heave 'em overboard and try again.” So this was a common view 125 years ago. ---
**Author:** ![Keeve](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/f07891/32.png) [@Keeve](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Keeve)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2022, 10:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/two-questions-re-pr-1964-smoking-health-hazard-awareness/968889/23 "2022-08-01T10:15:46Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > the cost of cigarettes, at 25c a pack, were not that much of a consideration in those days. That’s equivalent to five candy bars. At about [$6.28 per pack](https://www.verywellmind.com/how-much-money-does-smoking-cost-you-4143324), that’s about the same nowadays. ---
**Author:** ![Banksiaman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/banksiaman/32/3334_2.png) [@Banksiaman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Banksiaman)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2022, 10:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/two-questions-re-pr-1964-smoking-health-hazard-awareness/968889/24 "2022-08-01T10:19:45Z")
Cigarettes were a luxury until the introduction of automated ciggy machines dropped the unit price into popular affordability in the later 19th century. The alternative that most people used was pipe-smoking. There was a clear and widely known association between pipe smoking and cancers of the lips and tongues, esp with clay pipes which tended to stick and tear off bits of lip skin. However it was the skin trauma and not the toxicity of the burning tobacco products that was seen as the usual cause. In that context cig smoking was seen as being safer. An Australian discussion of the reason why smoking was bad in 1893 offered the following bad side-effects for heavy smokers. Notably cancer was not mentioned among the deleterious effects: _‘marked nervousness, trembling of the whole body, unsteadiness of the hands, and twitching of different muscles. There may be also swimming of the head, severe headache, and a feeling of despondency. In other cases there may be irritability of temper, a want of will determination, and progressive loss of memory. The special senses–sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch–may all be blunted.’_ ---
**Author:** ![Charlie\_Tan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/charlie_tan/32/12582_2.png) [@Charlie\_Tan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Charlie_Tan)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2022, 11:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/two-questions-re-pr-1964-smoking-health-hazard-awareness/968889/25 "2022-08-01T11:38:24Z")
> [@Kent\_Clark](#): > > Air pollution was a lot worse back then, particularly in places where coal and oil furnaces were common, and cars burned leaded gasoline (and when you checked your oil every time you filled up to see just how much your car was burning.) A few cigarettes here and there was no big deal. I think I need a clarification here: Are you saying that air pollution was bad, and people knew this. And as a result, they thought that smoking wasn’t a big deal, when it came to the larger picture? or That air pollution of the time was so bad, that smoking cigarettes wasn’t very harmful, as compared to inhaling fumes from an engine, living close to a coal power plant? ---
**Author:** ![Crane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crane/32/3495_2.png) [@Crane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crane)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2022, 12:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/two-questions-re-pr-1964-smoking-health-hazard-awareness/968889/26 "2022-08-01T12:57:36Z")
> [@Francis\_Vaughan](#): > > So 1950 is a good start to it, and by 1960 serious evidence. True, the smoking fad seemed to peak in the mid 60’s. It was a macho defiance of the danger. We non-smokers were considered immature. Real men smoke. I remember corporate meetings where the smoke formed a dense, visible layer in the room. To even take notice of it would have been a sign of weakness. Kind of a Marlboro man thing. ---
**Author:** ![Francis\_Vaughan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/francis_vaughan/32/3093_2.png) [@Francis\_Vaughan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Francis_Vaughan)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2022, 1:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/two-questions-re-pr-1964-smoking-health-hazard-awareness/968889/27 "2022-08-01T13:40:47Z")
My father relates how when he was at university studying medicine in the 1940’s, some of his fellow students were aggressively asking “when are you going to take up smoking?” It was indeed a curious macho thing. It was simply expected, by some, that men would be taking up the habit. He attended Exeter University, which counted as one of its bigger benefactors, the Wills family. The residential hall he stayed in was Wills Hall. This is of course the Wills of WD & HO Wills (now Imperial Brands). It looks as if the university has expunged the name now. ---
**Author:** ![dolphinboy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dolphinboy/32/330_2.png) [@dolphinboy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dolphinboy)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2022, 2:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/two-questions-re-pr-1964-smoking-health-hazard-awareness/968889/28 "2022-08-01T14:01:31Z")
> [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](#): > > Do you mean the sputtering and coughing that usually happen the first time someone tries to smoke, or are you referring to a chronic smoker’s cough? I think it was more the former than the latter. These kids had only been smoking for a few years at most by this time… ---
**Author:** ![Francis\_Vaughan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/francis_vaughan/32/3093_2.png) [@Francis\_Vaughan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Francis_Vaughan)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2022, 2:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/two-questions-re-pr-1964-smoking-health-hazard-awareness/968889/29 "2022-08-01T14:13:41Z")
Spike Milligan wrote possibly the best ever description of a smoker waking in the morning to his first cigarette. Whilst written in 1971 it describes his time in WW2, From _Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall_. It is hard to say that the evil effects were not realised, if not the precise medical conditions that would take their toll. Hopefully this counts as within fair use. If you enjoy this there is a much more where it comes form. > [@](#): > > All silent, save those great lung-wracking coughs that follow early morning cigarettes. The cough would start in silence; first there was the great inhale, the smoke sucked deep down into the lungs, and held there while the victim started what was to be an agonised body spasm. The face would first turn sweaty lemon, the shoulders hunched, the back humped like Brahmin bull. The legs would bend, the hand grabbed the thighs to support the coming convulsion. The cough would start somewhere down in the shins, the eyes would be screwed tight to prevent being jettisoned from the head, the mouth gripped tight to preserve the teeth. Suddenly from afar comes a rumbling like a hundred Early Victorian Water Closets. Slowly the body would start to tremble and the bones to rattle. The first things to shake were the ankles, then up the shins travelled the shakes, and next the knees would revolve and turn jelliform; from there up the thighs to the stomach it came, now heading for the blackened lungs. This was the stage when a sound like a three ton garden roller being pulled over corrugated iron was heard approaching the heaving chest. Following this up the convulsed body was a colour pattern, from a delicate green at the ankles to layers of pinks, blue, varicose purple, and sweaty red. As the cough rose up the inflated throat, the whole six colours were pushed up into the victims face. It had now reached the inner mouth; the last line of defence, the cheeks, were blown out the size of football bladders. The climax was nigh! The whole body was now a purple shuddering mass! After several mammoth attempts to contain the cough, the mouth would finally explode open. > > Loose teeth would fly out, bits of breakfast, and a terrible rasping noise filled the room, Aweeioussheiough!!! followed by a long, silent stream of spume-laden air: on and on it went until the whole body was drained of oxygen, the eyes were popping, and veins like vines standing out on the head, which was now down ‘twixt knees. This atrophied pose held for seconds. Finally, with a dying attempt, fresh air was sucked back into the body, just in time to do it all over again. ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2022, 2:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/two-questions-re-pr-1964-smoking-health-hazard-awareness/968889/30 "2022-08-01T14:23:57Z")
> [@dolphinboy](#): > > When my dad went into the Army in WWII, he said cigarettes were given to soldiers as part of their rations. My father was a doctor during WWII (and after.) He was furious about that because it was quite clear to him by the early 1940’s that smoking tobacco was bad for one’s health and that it was addictive, and providing cigarettes to large quantities of young men who were under high stress conditions was going to produce large numbers of addicts. > [@MandaJo](#): > > I get the impression it was like caffeine today > We know caffeine isn’t great for us There’s actually quite a lot of mixed info on the subject. Too much caffeine is bad for people, no question; but smaller quantities may be advantageous. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2022, 2:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/two-questions-re-pr-1964-smoking-health-hazard-awareness/968889/31 "2022-08-01T14:28:03Z")
> [@thorny\_locust](#): > > My father was a doctor during WWII (and after.) He was furious about that because it was quite clear to him by the early 1940’s that smoking tobacco was bad for one’s health and that it was addictive, and providing cigarettes to large quantities of young men who were under high stress conditions was going to produce large numbers of addicts. I’ll assume he was equally upset over war being bad for the young men’s health. > [@thorny\_locust](#): > > There’s actually quite a lot of mixed info on the subject. Too much caffeine is bad for people, no question; but smaller quantities may be advantageous. So far I haven’t seen any dire warnings either. It’s been studied often, Caffeine doesn’t appear to have the serious health implications of smoking. ---
**Author:** ![Kent\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kent_clark/32/105_2.png) [@Kent\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kent_Clark)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2022, 3:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/two-questions-re-pr-1964-smoking-health-hazard-awareness/968889/32 "2022-08-01T15:05:20Z")
> [@Charlie\_Tan](#): > > I think I need a clarification here: > Are you saying that air pollution was bad, and people knew this. And as a result, they thought that smoking wasn’t a big deal, when it came to the larger picture? > or > That air pollution of the time was so bad, that smoking cigarettes wasn’t very harmful, as compared to inhaling fumes from an engine, living close to a coal power plant? Mostly the former. We have a great ability to delude ourselves into thinking what WE do can’t possibly make any difference. ---
**Author:** ![MandaJo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ac91a4/32.png) [@MandaJo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MandaJo)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2022, 4:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/two-questions-re-pr-1964-smoking-health-hazard-awareness/968889/33 "2022-08-01T16:24:40Z")
> [@thorny\_locust](#): > > There’s actually quite a lot of mixed info on the subject. Too much caffeine is bad for people, no question; but smaller quantities may be advantageous I’m not arguing caffeine is vad like tobacco: more like our current attitude may be analogous. Like, someone asked why, if people thought cigarettes were innocuous, were they forbidden to children? I think caffeine fits that description. I probably should have narrowed the analogy to energy drinks, though. They definitely have the same “bad, but edgy cool bad” vibe. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2022, 4:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/two-questions-re-pr-1964-smoking-health-hazard-awareness/968889/34 "2022-08-01T16:38:13Z")
When considering what children should consume I’d agree caffeine and energy drinks are a concern. How we perceive their affect on our own health as adults making our own choices to use or abstain is not surprisingly a different attitude than we apply to our children’s health. Clearly certain substances can have worse long term effects on children than adults, but even if not a parents concern for a child’s health should be much more cautious than the concern for their own health. ---
**Author:** ![MandaJo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ac91a4/32.png) [@MandaJo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MandaJo)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2022, 5:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/two-questions-re-pr-1964-smoking-health-hazard-awareness/968889/35 "2022-08-01T17:29:47Z")
Sure. Its just someone said “if they didn’t think cigarettes were bad, why did they keep them from kids?” My point is that you can think of something as bad enough to keep away feom kids but not so bad that you are a fool for indulging. ---
**Author:** ![Moriarty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/moriarty/32/49_2.png) [@Moriarty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Moriarty)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2022, 5:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/two-questions-re-pr-1964-smoking-health-hazard-awareness/968889/36 "2022-08-01T17:40:16Z")
If you look up pictures of newsboys from around 1900 (who were child laborers), they routinely smoked. These were kids who worked out of necessity due to their poverty. So I think we can surmise that smoking by children was associated with a poorer, lower class element. Nevertheless, it wasn’t quite the scandal as it would be today if we saw a kid, aged 8 or 9, selling some wares with a cig hanging out of his mouth. [![](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/08/14/14/17263456-7355737-Pictured_are_a_group_of_American_Delivery_Telegram_workers_slump-a-34_1565789977693.jpg) ](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/08/14/14/17263456-7355737-Pictured_are_a_group_of_American_Delivery_Telegram_workers_slump-a-34_1565789977693.jpg) ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2022, 5:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/two-questions-re-pr-1964-smoking-health-hazard-awareness/968889/37 "2022-08-01T17:44:46Z")
Different feelings existed in different times. Cigarettes were at first considered effete compared to cigars, pipes, and snuff. But they were also more convenient, and one could roll their own easily. In frontier areas or during wartime their ease of procurement and use won out. They got popular during the Civil War and then revitalized by WWII, again because of convenience. Kids could emulate adults with cigarettes or faux cigarettes. Lighting up a weed with a fuzzy end didn’t draw smoke into the lungs but looked cool. The bad boy in every children’s book was trying to tempt the good hero not into alcohol or sex but smoking. A newspaper search found candy shops selling candy cigarettes back to 1889. If grown-ups thought smoking was part of being grown-up and kids imitated them as soon as possible, then the smoking habit would be almost impossible to overthrow. People say that nicotine is harder to kick than heroin. Whether strictly true or not, anything in America society associated with being adult, on top, strong, and both anti-authority as a kid and the expected thing as an adult plus being addictive will make not doing it a pariah activity, as much as teetotaling. Therefore it doesn’t surprise me much that anti-smoking - tobacco - campaigns only finally started working in the 1960s, when being as different from your parents as possible suddenly became a norm. ---
**Author:** ![Mk\_VII](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5f9b8f/32.png) [@Mk\_VII](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mk_VII)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2022, 6:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/two-questions-re-pr-1964-smoking-health-hazard-awareness/968889/38 "2022-08-01T18:41:43Z")
"Wingate was strongly against smoking, and at one time proposed to eliminate cigarettes from the ration: he was dissuaded from doing less by the pleas of the smokers (headed by Fergusson) than by the difficulties of extracting the cigarettes from the cartons in which the rations were already packed. i believe that the presence of cigarettes in the ration saved men’s lives: it was noticeable that the smoker felt less hungry than the non-smoker, and non-smokers took to native tobacco to stave it off …I used to allow any man to smoke at any time. If your men are so under-trained as not to be competent to judge when it is safe or otherwise to smoke, it is time you went out of business as a commander of guerilla troops. If a man was guilty of what we called ‘non-tactical smoking’, he was forbidden to smoke for a month. In two years I only had two cases. " Bernard Fergusson, _The Wild Green Earth_ ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2022, 6:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/two-questions-re-pr-1964-smoking-health-hazard-awareness/968889/39 "2022-08-01T18:55:52Z")
> [@TriPolar](#): > > I’ll assume he was equally upset over war being bad for the young men’s health. He was. But he was pretty upset about the health of relatives and others being murdered by the Nazis, also. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2022, 8:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/two-questions-re-pr-1964-smoking-health-hazard-awareness/968889/40 "2022-08-01T20:10:11Z")
> [@themapleleaf](#): > > 1 - Did the average person in the first half of the 20th century sincerely believe that smoking, if not done to excess, was perfectly safe for one’s health, or did they have some level of consciousness that it was bad, perhaps lying to themselves about it? Almost everyone knew it was bad, they were called “coffin nails” since late 1800’s. But not that they caused lung cancer. Big Tobacco knew at least as early as 1953 that smoking was a cause of lung cancer, but suppressed it. However, Cig smoking (the most deadly) wasn’t all that common until ww2, so people would not see the relationship until the early 50’s. The first surge in smoking occurred due to the Spanish Flu epidemic, since chaw and thus spitting was considered a cause of it. Before that, men smoked pipes or especially cigars, and did smokeless. Those were sometimes shown to be a cause of mouth cancer, Cig smoking peaked in the 60’s, and has been dropping steadily since the late 70’s. > [@dolphinboy](#): > > . When my dad went into the Army in WWII, he said cigarettes were given to soldiers as part of their rations. Those soldiers that didn’t smoke would trade ciggies for other rations, like a chocolate bar True. My Dad said the same thing, and he traded until he got hooked. I suggest “The Golden Holocaust” by Robert Proctor. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/two-questions-re-pr-1964-smoking-health-hazard-awareness/968889.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/two-questions-re-pr-1964-smoking-health-hazard-awareness/968889.md?page=3)