Even as far back as the 70’s, my aunt, who was a teenager at the time, kept lecturing my granddad on the dangers of smoking and tobacco, urging him to quit, but everyone just brushed her off as ‘arrogant’.
Apparently lots of people knew even then how dangerous smoking was, but not many people cared that much. Even in the nineties, smoking was still very common.
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We’ve had evidence that it’s dangerous since like the 50s. So then. There’s been a slow and gradual change over the years as more evidence has come out, and smoking has been pushed out of society through the smoking ban, brandless packaging etc.
“by the time I get cancer they’ll have a cure for it”
When I was in primary school 20~ years ago they covered it quite extensively. So at least 20 years.
My grandfather was a gp in the 50s. According to my grandmother, he came home one day, in the 50s, having read some of the first research on the effects of smoking, got all the cigarettes in the house and threw them in the fire. Told my grandma, that’s that, we don’t smoke anymore.
Poor fucker still died of cancer at the age of 62. Not lung cancer though, so that’s something.
If I remember correctly, it was in the 1920s but because everyone smoked, even the doctors and people on medical boards, the information wasn’t public knowledge for decades. People don’t like hearing that what they do and love is bad for them.
The same thing has been happening with eating meat, eggs, dairy and processed foods. There is an abundance of evidence saying that these things are bad for you, and stopping eating them can reverse the dietary diseases they caused, but people don’t want to hear it.
Same with alcohol too. A known depressant and carcinogen, of which there is no safe limit to consume, and yet you have to justify why you’re not drinking it.
Quite early but the thing about smoking and smokers is it is all done slowly and individually. I doubt any smokers think they will be smoking in their old age. They all want to quit or cut down “soon”. They know one won’t kill them, neither will 100 or 1000. You can say the same about drinking, pollution, even cured meats. We shrug it off but maybe in 50 years we will look back and think we were all crazy to ignore it.
Depends on who you mean by ‘we’. The Tobacco industry knew in the 1950s, and were doing their best to suppress or discredit any research on it.
https://news.stanford.edu/pr/2007/pr-proctor-021407.html
>by the middle of the 1950s there was a scientific consensus that smoking caused lung cancer. But the tobacco industry fought that finding, both in the public eye and within the scientific community. Tobacco companies funded skeptics, started health reassurance campaigns, ran advertisements in medical journals and researched alternate explanations for lung cancer, such as pollution, asbestos and even the keeping of birds. Denying the case against tobacco was “closed,” they called for more research as a tactic to delay regulation.
Probably part of a wider social thing about how much influence the state should have on an individual’s life.
FWIW quick google says the anti-smoking campaign was started in 1984. *The first national No Smoking Day was held on Ash Wednesday (get it?), 29 February 1984,*
As well as depending what you mean by “we” it depends what you mean by “know”.
Think of tobacco harms as like climate change. Even when almost all doctors and medical scientists finally grasped that it was bad (likely not until the late 70s or even early 80s), some of them still thought it was ‘not that bad’ or ‘on a sliding scale’ (a couple a day to calm your nerves isn’t that bad, etc), and you could still find at least *some* willing to argue that it was a big hoax/silly fantasy.
So it’s hardly surprising that ordinary people, politicians making policies (and getting nice fat donations from the tobacco industry…) were uncertain until, well, now. Even now people do it and will tell you that it’s not so bad, they’re more likely to die in a car accident, etc.
It’s worth noting that nicotine is one of the most addictive substances there is. A bigger head scratcher is why so many people *still* refuse to use a seat belt.
All four of my Grandparents smoked over 60 a day. they all lived past 83.
418 years ago, King James i called it ‘a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.’
Researchers in this country began looking more seriously in 1949 and Doll and Hill published important research about the health impact of smoking in 1954, but it wasn’t until 1962 that the Royal College of Physicians published research linking smoking to lung cancer, and asked the government to take action. It then took a fair amount of time for it to be accepted by the public.
My granddad died of lung cancer when my mother was a teenager. She hated me smoking. My uncle on my father’s side, who was a heavy smoker from a young age, died of natural causes in his nineties. Many people believe anecdotal evidence, and everyone knows someone like my Dad’s brother.
King James the 1st wrote about it in the beginning of the 17th century, including how injurious it was to the lungs. People always knew it wasn’t good for you, but what with the dropsy, plague, working in mines and factories, pollution and a million other life shortening factors over the centuries, nobody much cared.
What do you do if your girlfriend starts smoking?
The whole attitude to drugs is odd. Illegal ones can cause crime through those addicted stealing to feed that addiction. Alcohol causes mayhem in many a city centre etc. Fags are bad for your health and unpleasant for others. I’d say we need a more balanced approach to all of them. Not the ‘I don’t use that one, so it should be banned’ so common to hear.
Around about the time people started smoking. King James I wrote a pamphlet on the evils of tobacco in 1604.
Well German studies suggested a link in the 1920s, but were pretty much ignored.
The definitive epidemiological work in this country was by Sir Richard Doll who published his first work on cigarettes and the link to lung cancer in the British Medical Journal in 1950.
So 8 years before I was born.
In 1962 over 70% of British men and 40% of British women smoked.
This had fallen to 30% of the population by the early 1990s and 21% by 2010.