I like to look back at newspapers from 100 years ago to get a perspective on how much has changed in the past century. I read an interesting article in the Henry County weekly for June 10, 1921. It described the economic impact of a potential ban on tobacco, which was being discussed at the time. Of course, there would be the obvious impacts, but some were downright surprising to me. According to the article, tobacco production used 45 million pounds of licorice and 50 million pounds of sugar. The talk of any ban would go away in the 1920s as the tobacco lobby took over and led us in the wrong direction for decades. Even though cigarette smoking is way down from its peak in the 1960s and 1970s, it is still higher today than in 1921.
I guess everyone has a tobacco experience. My daddy said he went to spend the night with Charles Chaffin, his cousin. Once Uncle Ed and Auth Ruth went to bed, Charles brought out the cigars. My daddy said he got “sick as a dog.” I asked him if Charles got sick, and he said no, but he didn’t think that was Charles’ first one.
I remember my sister Tammy and I found a partial pack of cigarettes on the side of the road one time. I decided to take it home. I don’t recall how old I was, but I may have been a teenager by then. I showed them to daddy, and somehow one of us decided I should give one a try. So, I lit one up and maybe got a tad of smoke in my mouth and coughed it out. After a bit of instruction on how it was supposed to be done, I took a nice drag and had a 2-minute coughing fit. I was done – an addiction conquered before it ever got out of the gate. I haven’t smoked since.
For my generation, though, it’s a miracle every one of us isn’t smoking today. In some ways, our childhood candy aisle at the store didn’t look much different from the tobacco aisle. We had bubble gum cigarettes, bubble gum cigars, candy cigarettes, and bubble gum in a pouch like chewing tobacco. When I got to high school, students even had a designated smoking area.
Even though smoking was beginning to decline when I started working in the early 1980s, it was still common for an office to be smoke-filled. In the late 1980s, we went through an era we called “fan wars.” Some people bought these small 6-inch personal fans to direct smoke away from their desks. Blowing smoke away from your desk meant you were blowing smoke towards someone else’s. Eventually, everyone had a fan, and then they started getting bigger. Management stepped in when one man brought in a standard 20-inch box fan.
Today, the risks associated with smoking are well known. Lung cancer, which was rare in the 1800s, causes more deaths today than any other type of cancer. The good news is that it’s never too late to quit smoking. A person who quit smoking ten years ago is as unlikely to die of lung cancer as someone who never smoked. If you smoke, quit. If you don’t smoke, don’t start.