[quote=“boingboing, post:1, topic:88454”]Who wouldn’t want a Hanna-Barbera character blowing smoke rings with materials that children lit on fire![/quote]How did these work, anyway? I would be inclined to believe that they simply didn’t, and that the extinguished cigarette would send up a boring old undistinguished curl of smoke. Are the “cigarettes” hollow tubes? Is there something in the interior of the “characters” that produces a unique air flow?
2 Likes
The lolly cigarettes in Australia used to be called ‘Fags’. Got changed to ‘Fads’ in… maybe the mid-80’s? Not sure if they’re still available.
Edited to add: nup, Wikipedia says the name didn’t change until the 1990s, for christ’s sake. That’s disgraceful. And they’re called ‘fun sticks’ now.
7 Likes
Now I feel all nostalgic 
3 Likes
Ok, I thought I had tried candy cigs once, and they were terrible and tasted like chalk and I couldn’t understand the appeal - I guess I’m remembering correctly. I suppose the sole appeal was getting to play “grown-up.”
5 Likes
I think i’ve had the terrible chalk version too, and the chocolate ones. I distinctly recall feeling and thinking that we were getting away with something adult.
7 Likes
i started smoking when i was 13, too, i think. used to pilfer my mom’s menthol cigs. quit in my 20s as well. i don’t remember the candy cigs tasting like chalk – i mean, have you ever TASTED chalk? – they tasted like Necco wafers to me, and i’ve always liked Necco wafers.
5 Likes
Despite being anti-smoking since the age 3, and living in a non-smoking family, I loved candy cigs, and my mother would buy them when I asked, which was usually in the grocery store checkout line, where they were placed eye-level for kids. They were fun for pretending, and even better, were candy, they never made me want to actually smoke. Because real cigs, unlike the candy ones, were stinky, made your eyes sting, and were not candy.
10 Likes
From 1604:
A custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse.
Candy cigarettes were still around in the early 1980s when I was a kid, I kind of miss that chalky taste now I’m reminded of it.
10 Likes
Not only that, but the idea that smoking could be harmful or deadly long predates the existence of the kinds of clinical trials we’d acknowledge as “scientific” today. People noticed that lifelong smokers got wheezy, tired, and dead faster than other people. Given the unsubtle effect of smoking on the health, they’d have to have been pretty blind not to.
That’s what all those old-timey ads reading “FOUR OUT OF FIVE DOCTORS WHO SERVED IN CRIMEA AGREE: CHESTERFIELD’S DOESN’T TAKE YOUR WIND LIKE OTHER TOBACCO BLENDS” are about. Creating some space for debate about something people would otherwise take as totally obvious.
9 Likes
I always thought they were gross and tasted like chalk, so I avoided them.
My parents did forbid me from buying “big league chew” gum saying that it glorified tobacco use - until I showed them my math that a pouch of it was at the time about 40% cheaper than buying the same weight of gum in sticks. I wasn’t buying it for illustrations of drooling baseball players.
6 Likes
“A custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs…”
3 Likes
For added irony points, Stanley Matthews never smoked. He was still playing professional football when he was 50 (most players retire in their mid 30s)
4 Likes
Ya beat me to it.
1 Like
Eh, I it appears this is more of an opinion piece, not one based on evidence - especially when it invokes the four humours. It comes off as “stop liking what I don’t like”. I am sure there are similar examples of people extolling the benefits of smoking and tobacco. At any rate, this doesn’t really show it was a widely held belief smoking was bad for you. Though back then people often didn’t live long enough for smoking long term effects to take hold.
1 Like
Pretty sure you can still get these at Galco’s
I’m surprised it hasn’t occurred to anyone to ban root beer and ginger ale for the same reasons.
2 Likes
For me, rock bottom was Pixie Stix. At one point, things got so bad that I was ready to chase down a whole cupful of Pop Rocks with a Coke and just end it all but Macho Man Randy Savage was there to help me step into a Slim Jim and kick the sugar habit once and for all.
8 Likes
There was a fairly traditional brand of chocolate cigarettes in Brazil. I’m guessing for economy first, then nostalgia, they kept for decades the retrotastic 50s package featuring a nationally famous-anonymous kid enjoying the product. Sort of our version of the Kinder Chocolate kid. There was also a second kid (with the hat and dapper-rascal tie) that curiously no one seems to remember as much.
This remained unchanged until 1996(!) when someone complained about it to a consumer rights group. So they changed the name to “chocolate rolls” and came up with a hilariously perfunctory thumbs and ammo style hand swap. Same friggin’ hand on both kids, even.
Nowadays it’s sold as “chocopencils”. Pfft. Everyone knows the truth.
6 Likes
Here’s one for you:
Maybe not, but that wasn’t a one-off; a doctor wrote at roughly the same time:
it is so hurtfull and dangerous to youth, I wish that […] it were as well knowen by the name of Youths-bane
4 Likes
Good for you! Lung cancer isn’t fun.
7 Likes
