# When did quitting smoking become a thing? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [March 27, 2016, 2:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-quitting-smoking-become-a-thing/750303 "2016-03-27T02:42:24Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2016, 10:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-quitting-smoking-become-a-thing/750303/21 "2016-03-27T22:51:24Z")
My father had a heart attack in 1949, age 43, and was ordered to stop smoking. He didn’t and had a fatal heart attack 20 years later and died at 63. I had a heart attack in 1965 and never smoked again. Gave it up cold turkey, there were no patches, no gum. I’m still alive. I was in grad school from 1959-62. When we graduate students bummed a cigarette from each other, we usually asked, “Give my a cancerette.” Certainly, by then we were aware of at least some of the health aspects. And quitting was a thing most of us aspired to. ---
**Author:** ![Squink](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b5e925/32.png) [@Squink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Squink)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2016, 12:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-quitting-smoking-become-a-thing/750303/22 "2016-03-28T00:45:22Z")
Mid 80’s around here. Restaurants started having no-smoking sections. Chem labs became off limits for cigarettes. If you wanted a puff or two you had to gou to the smokers lounge at the end of the hall. It hit different parts of the country at different times, until by the 90’s, smoking inside a public building, or even along city streets was verboten in many places. ---
**Author:** ![Yllaria](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yllaria/32/3452_2.png) [@Yllaria](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yllaria)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2016, 2:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-quitting-smoking-become-a-thing/750303/23 "2016-03-28T14:26:01Z")
My dad was born in 1930, started smoking in 1945, and quit in 1956, to set a good example for his new family. When the warning labels came out, he snorted derisively and said that cigarettes had been called coffin nails for as long as he could remember, that anyone who needed an official warning was weak-minded. ---
**Author:** ![Eonwe](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eonwe/32/240_2.png) [@Eonwe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eonwe)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2016, 2:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-quitting-smoking-become-a-thing/750303/24 "2016-03-28T14:30:54Z")
From Sinclair Lewis’ _Babbitt_, published in 1922: > [@](#): > > He stopped smoking at least once a month. He went through with it like the solid citizen he was: admitted the evils of tobacco, courageously made resolves, laid out plans to check the vice, tapered off his allowance of cigars, and expounded the pleasures of virtuousness to every one he met. He did everything, in fact, except stop smoking. ---
**Author:** ![Notassmartasithought](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/c0e974/32.png) [@Notassmartasithought](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Notassmartasithought)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2016, 12:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-quitting-smoking-become-a-thing/750303/25 "2016-03-29T00:47:20Z")
Three or four milestones… My father was one of the great all-time smokers. He’d chain smoke (light one cigarette from another) while he was lecturing college classes. He quit cigarettes in '64 after the surgeon general’s report, but of course believed he didn’t inhale cigars, so he would do a half dozen a day of those. I began smoking in high school, in’66 or '67. Once we got to an adult relationship after I got out of college, every time I went home, Dad would bum a cigarette or two. That lasted until about 10 years ago, when I finally quit. Then he had to bum from my brother, and I did, too. I also remember that when I got married in '79, my bride and I were both smokers, and I proposed that we wouldn’t ever start nagging each other about quitting, no matter what we decided for ourselves. So the deal was getting bigger and bigger then. ---
**Author:** ![RivkahChaya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rivkahchaya/32/8919_2.png) [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2016, 1:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-quitting-smoking-become-a-thing/750303/26 "2016-03-29T01:22:33Z")
> [@Mangosteen](#): > > [http://www.publicgoodprojects.org/blog/2015/7/29/the-smoking-war-isnt-over](http://www.publicgoodprojects.org/blog/2015/7/29/the-smoking-war-isnt-over) > > I don’t believe that it was “obviously commonplace” to think about quitting smoking in 1964. If you scroll down on the link, you’ll see on the chart that people really didn’t start to quit in large numbers until around 1980, 16 years after the Surgeon General’s report came out. As I recall, people just weren’t buying the 1964 report. They had been told for so long that smoking was fine or even healthy that the rather sudden turn around took awhile to sink in. My mother was horrified by the report, and threw out all cigarettes that day. Made my father quit too, so neither of them has ever smoked in my lifetime, except for one “It’s a boy!” cigar my father once smoked in 1970 that my mother made him smoke outside. In fact, the only people in my family who smoked in my life were my mother’s sister and her husband, who she divorced around 1977. She quit smoking shortly after. She didn’t actually start until she started dating him, which was when she was in her 20s, so it wasn’t an ingrained habit, like people who start in their teens. My parents started in college, but they both started college at 17. My mother had started school a year early, and my father had a November birthday, and the cut-off date was really late in his school system. > [@Daylate](#): > > I quit back in 1959. This was at least partly because of the constant drumbeat of articles (Readers Digest had a lot of them) on the dangers and results of smoking. And when I finally made up my mind to quit it turned out to be very easy. My mother, who has a theory on everything, has a theory that the people who quit in the first 10 years or so after the Surgeon General’s report came out (and probably anyone who quit before that) wasn’t an addict, since nearly everyone smoked. More and more people quit, with little trouble for the first people who quit, and more and more trouble the more years you got away from 1964, because you got harder and harder-core addicts. Eventually, by about the mid-80s, new smokers were only people who had addictive tendencies, so everyone who tries to quit finds it hard. Like I said, my mother has a theory on everything, and some of them are pretty whack-a-do, but this one is kinda reasonable, if not backed up by any data. Also, RE: when quitting became a thing, the American Lung Assn. started a PSA campaign called “You mind very much if they smoke” some time in the 70s. Basically, when people took a cigarette out, they’d say “Mind if I smoke?” but they’d be lighting up as they said it, because no one ever said anything but “Yes.” It was just a convention. The idea of the ALA was for non-smokers to start saying “Yes, I do mind.” It was sort of a “SILENCE=DEATH” philosophy for non-smokers. I remember piping up once and telling my mother’s sister “I mind very much if you smoke.” My mother was horrified by my rudeness, but my aunt thought it was funny, and put her cigarettes away. ---
**Author:** ![sbunny8](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c77e96/32.png) [@sbunny8](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sbunny8)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2016, 7:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-quitting-smoking-become-a-thing/750303/27 "2016-03-29T19:34:20Z")
In 1897, Mark Twain wrote: > [@](#): > > She had run down and down and down, and had at last reached a point where medicines no longer had any helpful effect upon her. I said I knew I could put her upon her feet in a week. It brightened her up, it filled her with hope, and she said she would do everything I told her to do. So I said she must stop swearing and drinking, and smoking and eating for four days, and then she would be all right again. > > And it would have happened just so, I know it; but she said she could not stop swearing, and smoking and drinking, because she had never done those things. So there it was. She had neglected her habits, and hadn’t any. Now that they would have come good, there were none in stock. She had nothing to fall back on. She was a sinking vessel, with no freight in her to throw overboard and lighten ship withal. > > Why, even one or two little bad habits could have saved her, but she was just a moral pauper. When she could have acquired them she was dissuaded by her parents, who were ignorant people though reared in the best society, and it was too late to begin now. It seemed such a pity; but there was no help for it. These things ought to be attended to while a person is young; otherwise, when age and disease come, there is nothing effectual to fight them with. But it’s not clear whether he actually believed that smoking is unhealthy, or perhaps merely that it was considered immoral. ---
**Author:** ![RivkahChaya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rivkahchaya/32/8919_2.png) [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2016, 7:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-quitting-smoking-become-a-thing/750303/28 "2016-03-29T19:38:44Z")
> [@sbunny8](#): > > In 1897, Mark Twain wrote: > > But it’s not clear whether he actually believed that smoking is unhealthy, or perhaps merely that it was considered immoral. I think that’s pretty typical Twain satire. ---
**Author:** ![Anny\_Middon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/bc79bd/32.png) [@Anny\_Middon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anny_Middon)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2016, 8:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-quitting-smoking-become-a-thing/750303/29 "2016-03-29T20:28:35Z")
[I’ll just breathe the air](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHNj3xJS89o) ---
**Author:** ![Rick\_Kitchen](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rick_kitchen/32/522_2.png) [@Rick\_Kitchen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rick_Kitchen)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2016, 8:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-quitting-smoking-become-a-thing/750303/30 "2016-03-29T20:56:31Z")
> [@TSBG](#): > > It’s been a while since I read them, but I’m pretty sure that Bertie Wooster and friends, heavy smokers all, sometimes talk about wanting to quit–because smoking made it hard to breathe, not because of cancer. There’s even a type of cigarettes they call “gaspers.” > > ETA, most of these stories were written in the 20s/30s. One of the Lord Peter Wimsey stories has him going undercover working at an advertising agency where one of their clients was Gaspers cigarettes. I can remember, growing up in the early 60s, when all of the movie theaters advertised having air conditioning with “It’s KOOL inside”, where the signs were for KOOL cigarettes. ---
**Author:** ![kenobi\_65](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kenobi_65/32/13178_2.png) [@kenobi\_65](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kenobi_65)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2016, 9:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-quitting-smoking-become-a-thing/750303/31 "2016-03-29T21:26:40Z")
The 1971 Norman Lear film [Cold Turkey](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066927/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2) (starring Dick Van Dyke) depicted a tobacco company which offered any US town $25 million if the entire town could quit smoking for 30 days (and the company then went on to sabotage the town’s efforts). I remember watching the film on TV sometime in the 1970s, and one scene depicted the town’s doctor (ostensibly, the guardian of the town’s health) being, himself, a chain smoker. So, certainly, by that point, the knowledge that smoking is bad for you was fairly widespread in the US, and quitting was common enough to be the core of a movie plot. (Coincidentally, cigarette advertising on TV in the US was also banned at the beginning of 1971.) Also, the American Cancer Society’s [Great American Smokeout](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_Smokeout) campaign began in 1977, and it had roots going back several years before that. ---
**Author:** ![aceplace57](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aceplace57/32/3500_2.png) [@aceplace57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aceplace57)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2016, 11:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-quitting-smoking-become-a-thing/750303/32 "2016-03-29T23:45:54Z")
A 4-pack of commercial-grade cigarettes were included in [K rations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-ration). introduced during WWII [MCI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meal,_Combat,_Individual_ration)Introduced in 1958 did not include cigarettes. But coffee and cigarettes were in the accessory pack. Perhaps an early shift in the military’s view of cigarettes? But cigarettes were always very common. My dad got them tax free at the Base Bx. He finally quit in 1973. ---
**Author:** ![alphaboi867](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alphaboi867/32/3898_2.png) [@alphaboi867](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/alphaboi867)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2016, 12:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-quitting-smoking-become-a-thing/750303/33 "2016-03-30T00:25:15Z")
> [@Shakester](#): > > Well I hate to Godwin-ise a thread, but the Nazis ran an [anti-smoking campaign](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tobacco_movement_in_Nazi_Germany) back in the 1940s. > > Just goes to show that even the Nazis got one thing right. My grandmother quit smoking in the 1940s because of the Nazis. Well sort of; my grandfather had just joined the Navy and told her he wouldn’t marry a woman who smoked. She promptly threw her cigarettes out the car window and they eloped to Maryland. Grandpa was then sent to the Pacific. > [@Qadgop\_the\_Mercotan](#): > > Pope Urban VII came out against tobacco in the late 16th century. He banned all tobacco "in the porchway of or inside a church, whether it be by chewing it, smoking it with a pipe or sniffing it in powdered form through the nose." The penalty was excommunication. > > More historical encouragement to quit may be found here: [7 Historical Bans on Smoking | Mental Floss](http://mentalfloss.com/article/23758/7-historical-bans-smoking) IIRC James I of England/VI of Scotland wrote a treatise against smoking tobacco (he also wrote one against witchcraft). > [@RivkahChaya](#): > > …I remember piping up once and telling my mother’s sister “I mind very much if you smoke.” My mother was horrified by my rudeness, but my aunt thought it was funny, and put her cigarettes away. My grandmother refused to allow company to spoke in her house, in an era when even nonsmokers were expected to have ashtrays handy for company. Apparently she was thought quite the oddball. IIRC she wouldn’t let people smoke in the town post office either. ---
**Author:** ![salinqmind](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/3ec8ea/32.png) [@salinqmind](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/salinqmind)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2016, 3:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-quitting-smoking-become-a-thing/750303/34 "2016-03-30T03:09:58Z")
> [@alphaboi867](#): > > My grandmother quit smoking in the 1940s because of the Nazis. Well sort of; my grandfather had just joined the Navy and told her he wouldn’t marry a woman who smoked. She promptly threw her cigarettes out the car window and they eloped to Maryland. Grandpa was then sent to the Pacific If he was sent to the Pacific, wouldn’t your grandmother have quit smoking because of the Japanese? ---
**Author:** ![gkster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gkster/32/14107_2.png) [@gkster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gkster)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2016, 6:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-quitting-smoking-become-a-thing/750303/35 "2016-03-30T06:24:48Z")
A major plot point in one of the first detective novels, \*The Moonstone \* by Wilkie Collins (1868) is a main character quitting smoking cigars. Other characters in the story are familiar with the physical and psychological effects of quitting, like insomnia and irritability. ---
**Author:** ![chorpler](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chorpler/32/2888_2.png) [@chorpler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chorpler)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2016, 10:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-quitting-smoking-become-a-thing/750303/36 "2016-03-30T22:32:24Z")
> [@RivkahChaya](#): > > My mother was horrified by the report, and threw out all cigarettes that day. > > **snip** > > My mother, who has a theory on everything, has a theory that the people who quit in the first 10 years or so after the Surgeon General’s report came out (and probably anyone who quit before that) wasn’t an addict, since nearly everyone smoked. More and more people quit, with little trouble for the first people who quit, and more and more trouble the more years you got away from 1964, because you got harder and harder-core addicts. Your mother may have a good point. My copy of **Licit and Illicit Drugs** , the Consumers Union report by Edward Brecher, says: > [@](#): > > **from Chapter 26: Cigarettes and the 1964 Report of the Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee, page 186** > > For a brief few weeks, this report had a major nationwide impact. Within a few days after its publication, some chain supermarkets announced that cigarette sales had fallen 20 to 25 percent. In Iowa, where the impact of the report was most noticeable, tax officials reported that the number of taxed packages fell 31.7 percent in February 1964, the month after the report was issued. Nationally, the drop in taxed packages was between 15 and 20 percent. **The true impact of the report was much greater than even these figures suggest. For casual smokers (of less than a pack a day) were more likely to stop smoking than heavy smokers (two packs or more a day). Thus a 20 percent decline in number of cigarettes smoked may have represented a 25 or even 30 percent decline in number of smokers still smoking.** > > But the curtailment was short-lived; what has been called “the Great Forswearing” of January and February 1964 was followed by the “Great Relapse” of March… Within a few months cigarette consumption was back almost to pre-1964 levels. It sounds like most of the people who quit must have started up again, and presumably that would have been because of the withdrawal symptoms. ---
**Author:** ![jbaker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/59ef9b/32.png) [@jbaker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jbaker)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2016, 10:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-quitting-smoking-become-a-thing/750303/37 "2016-03-30T22:54:21Z")
There are plenty of 19th century discussions of quitting smoking: why people should do it, and how hard it is to do. Here’s one from 1838, [The Sailor's Magazine - Google Books](https://books.google.com/books?id=DtkZAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA31&dq=%22quit+smoking%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwju9OiHv-nLAhVDJh4KHcO-ArYQ6AEIUjAG#v=onepage&q=%22quit%20smoking%22&f=false). ---
**Author:** ![janeslogin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/df788c/32.png) [@janeslogin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/janeslogin)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2016, 10:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-quitting-smoking-become-a-thing/750303/38 "2016-03-31T22:40:14Z")
“Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)” is a Western swing novelty song written by Merle Travis and Tex Williams,[1] for Williams and his talking blues style of singing. Travis wrote the bulk of the song.[2] The original Williams version went to number one for 16 non-consecutive weeks on the Hot Country Songs chart.[3] Recorded on March 27, 1947, [[Smoke! Smoke! Smoke!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke!_Smoke!_Smoke!_(That_Cigarette))] [Smoke Smoke That Cigarette](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbKQklwNScA) I recall the GIs coming back from he Pacific Theater called them ‘‘coffin nails’’. ---
**Author:** ![Measure\_for\_Measure](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/measure_for_measure/32/557_2.png) [@Measure\_for\_Measure](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Measure_for_Measure)\ **Post date:** [April 1, 2016, 6:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-quitting-smoking-become-a-thing/750303/39 "2016-04-01T06:16:13Z")
Per person tobacco consumption peaked in 1965 and declined steadily afterwards. So I’m guessing that the 1964 report represented a turning point. Per capita tobacco consumption, data sampled every 5 years: > **[Cigarette Consumption, United States, 1900-2011](https://www.infoplease.com/math-science/health/substance-abuse/cigarette-consumption-united-states-1900-2011)** > > Consumption of cigarettes by Americans has been steadily declining since 1980. See just how many cigarettes Americans smoke below. Year Total no. in billions Per capita \>= 18 yrs. 1900 2.5 54 1905 3.6 70 1910 8.6 151 1915 17.9 285 1920 44.6 665... Ok, ok, it hit a 2nd peak in 1975. Still: ```auto Year Total no. in billions Per capita >= 18 yrs. 1900 2.5 54 1905 3.6 70 1910 8.6 151 1915 17.9 285 1920 44.6 665 1925 79.8 1,085 1930 119.3 1,485 1935 134.4 1,564 1940 181.9 1,976 1945 340.6 3,449 1950 369.8 3,522 1955 396.4 3,597 1960 484.4 4,171 1965 528.8 4,259 1970 536.5 3,985 1975 607.2 4,123 1980 631.5 3,851 1985 594.0 3,461 1990 525.0 2,827 1995 487.0 2,515 2000 430.0 2,092 2005 381.0 1,717 2010 300.4 1,278 ``` ---
**Author:** ![alphaboi867](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alphaboi867/32/3898_2.png) [@alphaboi867](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/alphaboi867)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2016, 12:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-quitting-smoking-become-a-thing/750303/40 "2016-04-02T00:21:54Z")
> [@salinqmind](#): > > If he was sent to the Pacific, wouldn’t your grandmother have quit smoking because of the Japanese? Apparently he didn’t realize he’d be sent to the Pacific when he signed up. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-quitting-smoking-become-a-thing/750303.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-quitting-smoking-become-a-thing/750303.md?page=3)