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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The 1971 Norman Lear film Cold Turkey (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 campaign began in 1977, and it had roots going back several years before that.
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.
IIRC James I of England/VI of Scotland wrote a treatise against smoking tobacco (he also wrote one against witchcraft).
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.
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.
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.
“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!]