Its hard to believe it today, but cigarettes were once lauded as a good thing. “Give your throat a vacation,” one 1930s advertisement reads. “Smoke a FRESH cigarette.”
For the first half of the 2oth century, cigarette manufacturers flourished. Then, in 1964, U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry issued a definitive report that linked smoking cigarettes with lung cancer.
Everything changed. Not overnight, of course, but over the course of the next 50 to 60 years, cigarette smoking has waned with only 14% of the population considered regular smokers.
Health risks are printed on the label. Images of disease-ridden smokers are plastered across boxes. We, as a society, know the risks.
But now we have e-cigarettes.