Those are awesome. Were.
Thanks for sharing!
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My inner 13-year-old has so many comments about “fun sticks.” Now there’s a phrase/double entendre that deserves haiku.
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Meh. I loved these things when I was a kid. I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my entire life, nor ever wanted to, nor ever intend to.
I’ve smoked plenty of other things, but never regular cigarettes.
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Good call. Even the cigars aren’t cigars any more. For the most part. I did find some Hillary Clinton gum cigars though.
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Psh. The distinguished child would not accept anything less than a bubblegum cigar, thank you very much.
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The first case-controlled studies linking cigarettes to cancer were in 1950 (4 in the US, 1 in the UK, the latter the very influential Doll and Hill study), but they were certainly prompted by such dangers being well-known long before that.
I don’t know when the first case-controlled studies were that sex causes babies, but it would be disingenuous to argue that nobody knew the link long before causation was statistically confirmed.
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It isn’t that “nobody knew” it’s that “nobody knew”.
Meaning people researching it, medical researchers, the early equivalent of a health nut etc. my have suspicions, hypothesis and more or less knew - but the average person did not. I am trying to think of a modern equivalent, but it is failing me.
At any rate back then doctors smoked and no one told anyone to not smoke during pregnancy. And the handful of doctors that were ahead of the curve in that area weren’t believed by the majority of the public.
But anyway, I still contend candy cigarettes were harmless. Kids imitate adults. If your parents or people you knew smoked, you would imitate them. You didn’t need candy to do it, any stick like item would work. As I said I imitated my mom (back when they did know smoking wasn’t good) as well as my uncle Larry and Boss Hog with smoking cigars (though my uncle Harry only chewed them.) That cigarettes were cool, grown up, and “normal” was the main reasons people started smoking. Same with drinking.
My pal found some Trump candy, but it was unlabeled as such:
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At this point it is hard to argue with you because there is apparently nothing you will accept as evidence. I’ll make one last stab.
In Smoking and Disease, an article in the 1977 NIDA monograph Research on Smoking Behavior, Julien Van Lancker says of doctors in the 1800s,
Many physicians claimed that tobacco caused ailments of the intestine
(colics and diarrhea, nausea, emesis), of the respiratory system
(ulceration of the lungs, asthma, cough), of the cardiovascular
system (pain in the heart, apoplexy) and in addition caused undernourishment, impotence and dulling of the brain.
It was common in cigarette advertisements in the 1920s for the pitch to be that doctors thought Brand X was less bad for you than other brands.cigarettes. Here’s a Lucky ad from the period:
The introduction of coffeecigarette filters in the 1940s was explicitly to reduce harm (of course they didn’t, but that’s another matter).
Readers Digest ran a series of articles on cigarettes and lung cancer in the 1940s, and even in the 1930s articles in popular magazines linking cigarettes to health problems (though not cancer) were common, see Ford, Ringold, and Rogers, Cigarettes in the Popular Press, 1930-1960: Preliminary Research, Advances in Consumer Research Volume 17, 1990:
citations to smoking and health were relatively frequent in the 1930s
tl;dr Doctors were in common agreement that cigarettes were bad for you at least as far back as the 1800s, tobacco companies communicated this fact indirectly to the masses through ads starting in the 1920s, popular magazines like Time and Reader’s Digest started to run stories on the links in the 1930s, and this has all been widely studied so there is no need for unfounded internet speculation.
ETA: Edited because I apparently can’t tell the difference between coffee and cigarettes; thanks @joeair61
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The Bush ones were better labeled
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I assume you meant cigarette filters. I hope you meant that because I drink a lot of coffee! Kent even made a cigarette filter that was mostly asbestos. Not a lot of science going on in those days.
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Oops! Yes, will edit. Though coffee filters actually do reduce harm.
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Notice they said “Race for the Senate”. So this was not too long after Monica.
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I see your point, but there’s also the flipside that cigarettes were commonly believed to be healthful. My grandfather was first given cigarettes by his father to help him “dry out” a lingering phlegmy cough he had.
My grandfather was 9 years old at the time.
The old wives’ cure of gently blowing cigarette smoke into an infected ear apparently can work, because the smoke kills any aerobic bacteria which are causing the infection.
And the part in The King’s Speech about smoking relaxing the throat and helping stutterers to speak more clearly, as recommended by the royal physicians? Historically accurate.
Ciggies featured in some cheap student cures for hangovers and mild food poisoning when I was in uni, but being strongly anti-smoking I never got the details. They all seemed to be Victorian-style purgative recipes (clean out the gut fast, ditch the disease at the same time).
The only contemporary recommendation of smoking I know of is for schizophrenics whose condition is bad enough to require hospitalisation. Supposedly the nicotine helps with the symptoms.
Now this is all over and above the part about how smoking long term will kill you. The point is these beliefs and cures all lived side-by-side, and to some extent still do, with the known risks of cancer, emphysema, and so on.
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My grandmother believed that dybbuks would get tangled in men’s beards, but I wouldn’t generalize from her #notallgrandmothers #notallgreatgrandfathers #notalldybbuks. While the extent of the harm was not really known until the 1950s, and even today one can imagine scenarios where one might smoke a little bit for some other purpose (eg, light up for a couple of puffs to remove a tick), that smoking was harmful was not a secret closely held by doctors before that.
Right. Hence my final paragraph.
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