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In the mid 20th century it came as a big surprise to many that smoking caused lung cancer. I mean, it’s fucking smoke. Inhaled into the lungs. It’s basically one step down from breathing in fire.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: June 21, 1954--
I guess when you have ads proclaiming “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette” it helps those coughing up black shit each morning live in blissful denial for a while. But not as long as non-smokers live, which is what a turning-point study presented on June 21, 1954 at an American Medical Association Conference revealed.
Prior to the previous century, lung cancer was uncommon, but then fancy new manufacturing technology coupled with runaway capitalism started cranking out the cancer sticks by the billions. The military gave them to soldiers for free in both world wars, eventually killing more men with friendly cigarette fire than died in battle. In 1900, the average cigarette consumption per capita was 54 per year, just over one a week. In 1963 that number had climbed to 4,345 cigarettes per year. That’s 84 per week, a dozen a day.
Beginning in 1952, two scientists working for the American Cancer Society, Cuyler Hammond and Daniel Horn, did a cohort study of 188,000 men to analyze smoking habits, health, and mortality. They found a “considerably higher death rate” among smokers, mostly due to heart disease and cancer, with a specific spike in lung cancer. Duh.
Fun fact: they were both heavy smokers, and the study prompted them to switch to smoking pipes, because they imagined that might be better. Oops.
The study launched a new wave of research that led to political pressure to do something about the health crisis smoking presented. A decade later there was a damnation of smoking’s deleterious health effects in a Surgeon General’s Report, which led to sweeping changes enacted in American tobacco policy. Since that time, rates of smoking in the U.S. have dropped to less than half of 1960s’ levels.
Oh, and big surprise, lung cancer rates have fallen as well.
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My Dad is now 95. He had a mild heart attack aged 48 in the mid 70s when I was a little kid. It was just serious enough to lay him out for a number of weeks and to scare the shit out of him to stop smoking, something he once told me he started at about 12!. He just stopped from a pack per day habit - none of that fancy nicotine patch or vape stuff in those days. He later developed angina and had a triple coronary bypass in 1989 and a pacemaker fitted some years later. Yet he soldiers on - pretty damn good for 95 really.
On the other hand, famously, British musician Roy Castle died from lung cancer. He was not a smoker but he spent many years playing trumpet in smoky jazz clubs.
Next week will be the 10th anniversary of my father's death from COPD he developed after a lifetime of smoking, a habit he picked up after he joined the US Army after WW2.
Fuck cigarettes