Smoking

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Smoking

Tobacco use and cultivation originated in South America and spread northward through the Americas, reaching the upper Mississippi Valley by 160 c.e. An important part of the Columbian exchange, tobacco took root in western Europe in the late sixteenth century, and then in Africa and the Asian mainland in the seventeenth century. Though Europeans first regarded tobacco as a medicinal herb, they discovered that the real demand was of a recreational nature. By the mid-1600s tobacco had joined alcohol and caffeine as one of the world's three great social drugs and had become an important source of revenue for colonial planters, merchants, and tax collectors.

Early Modern and Modern Tobacco Use

Early modern tobacco rituals varied by geography, class, and local custom. Some users preferred pipes, others chewing tobacco, others snuff. Though governments imposed different regulations and levels of taxation, a few generalizations hold across nations and cultures. Men used tobacco more often than women. Tobacco use typically began in childhood or adolescence. The more abundant the local supply, the larger the crop of neophytes and the sooner they started. Children as young as seven smoked in Britain's Chesapeake colonies, where tobacco pipes were nearly as ubiquitous as tobacco plants.

Tobacco initiation was a social process. It signified coming of age, that a boy was taking on the attributes of a man. Tobacco enhanced standing among male peers. It provided an occasion for relaxation and conviviality. Only later, as tobacco users became dependent on nicotine and suffered withdrawal symptoms in its absence, did the motive for consuming tobacco change. This reversal of effects is the single most consistent pattern running through the history of smoking. Children and adolescents began smoking for social reasons. They continued to smoke, often after they wished they could quit, because they had become addicted.

Knowing that youthful indulgence in tobacco led to a lifelong habit, and knowing that the habit was dirty, dangerous, and unhealthful, many parents, especially those of middle-class standing or pious temperament, discouraged children from using tobacco. Girls' use was considered particularly unseemly, though boys courted a whipping as well. The writer Samuel Clemens (1835–1910), better known as Mark Twain, admitted to smoking at age nine–privately at first, then in public only after his father died two years later. To acquire a supply, he and his friends traded old newspapers to the local tobacconist for cheap cigars.

That Clemens smoked, rather than chewed or sniffed, tobacco symbolized a broader nineteenth-century trend. Oral use remained popular in a few places, such as Iceland or Sweden, but elsewhere children's initiation into tobacco use increasingly meant initiation into smoking. Cigarette smoking was especially dangerous and addictive, because smoke could be inhaled into the lungs, where it delivered a powerful dose of nicotine directly to the bloodstream. At first store-bought cigarettes, hand-rolled specialty products aimed at the carriage trade, were too expensive for most children to afford. Then, in the 1880s, James B. Duke (1856–1925) transformed the industry with machine-production techniques. Prices dropped and use expanded. The United States, where per capita cigarette consumption increased tenfold between 1900 and 1917, was the epicenter of the first global cigarette revolution.

City boys were among the most avid consumers of Duke's products, and their insouciant smoking proved a powerful affront to bourgeois morality. Evangelical and progressive reformers attacked cigarettes on moral and health grounds, blaming "the little white slaver" for ruining children's health, encouraging intemperance, and poisoning the race. But such legislative barriers as they managed to erect (fifteen states outlawed some aspect of cigarette manufacture, distribution, or promotion) were soon swept aside. Widespread military use during World War I, Hollywood valorization, and mass advertising, including a successful campaign to recruit female smokers–the fastest growing segment of the market during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s–all helped legitimate cigarettes. Smoking's ordinariness became its best defense. Laws banning sale to minors persisted, though vending machines and mothers' purses provided easy means of circumvention. Youthful smoking became unremarkable, even de rigueur. Those who didn't smoke, the writer John Updike remembered, got nowhere in the Pennsylvania high-school society of the late 1940s. Updike's Irish contemporary and fellow writer Frank McCourt recalled his friends asking him, incredulously, how he could possibly go out with girls if he didn't smoke.

The accumulation of evidence that smoking caused cancer and other deadly diseases, which reached a critical mass in the early 1950s, threatened the prosperity of cigarette companies. They tried to defuse the crisis through public relations, suggesting that the jury was still out on the health question. This was, at best, a delaying tactic. The growing medical data eventually led to declining adult domestic consumption, heavier taxation, and increased regulation–the broad pattern in Western societies during the last third of the twentieth century.

Confronted with decreasing demand in North America and Europe, multinational companies like Philip Morris and British-American Tobacco adopted a two-pronged strategy. First, they recruited teenage smokers to replace the adults who died or quit, using advertising to suggest that smokers were independent, sexually potent, and disdainful of authority–in a word, cool. A social fact, that cigarettes served as accessories of teenage identity (and, for girls, of thinness), became a means of recruiting those who would ultimately come to depend on cigarettes as nicotine-delivery vehicles. Where advertisements were banned, companies devised alternative promotions, such as colorful logo tee shirts, or company-sponsored sporting events aimed at getting brand names and package colors before a youthful audience.

Smoking in the Developing World

Overseas expansion was the second means of acquiring new customers. In the 1970s, cigarette companies began to move more aggressively into developing nations. By the decade's end, smoking was up 33 percent in Africa, 24 percent in Latin American, and 23 percent in Asia. By 2001, of the approximately 1.1 billion people who smoked worldwide, 80 percent lived in the developing world. As in the industrialized nations, these smokers had started young. Most were male, although in a few cultures, such as the Maori–relative newcomers to cigarettes–women outnumbered men among smokers under the age of twenty-four. In China, where smoking remained a largely male pastime, advertisers targeted young women, hoping to enlarge the market, just as their predecessors had in the United States after World War I.

Western cigarettes also displaced traditional means of tobacco consumption. During the 1970s, Bangladeshi smokers put aside their hookahs and bidis (cheap, hand-rolled cigarettes) for manufactured brands. The change was particularly noticeable among young people, who saw cigarettes as a way to differentiate themselves from older generations. Advertisers encouraged the impulse, pitching brands like Diplomat (Ghana) or High Society (Nigeria) that connoted worldly success and Western values. Brand consciousness developed at an early age. By century's end 29 percent of South African five-year-olds could recognize specific brands of cigarettes. In Jordan 25 percent of adolescent children aged thirteen to fifteen said company representatives had offered them free cigarettes.

The result was a growing public-health crisis. According to the World Bank, by 1996 developing nations were losing $66 billion a year to smoking-related illnesses. Because the most serious effects of cigarettes did not begin to appear until twenty years or thirty years later, epidemiologists forecast worse to come. The World Health Organization (WHO) predicted 10 million tobacco-related deaths annually by 2030. Fully 50 percent of those in developing countries who began smoking would die of smoking-related diseases. Half again of that 50 percent would die in middle age, losing years of productive life and wasting the social resources that had been invested in their upbringing and education. In essence, tobacco companies' globalized drive for profit and survival had lured another, even larger generation into the pulmonary minefield. In 2001 alone, between 64,000 and 84,000 young people in the developing world began smoking every day.

Despite the health threat and economic consequences, governments in developing nations did little to challenge the cigarette's spread, typically imposing fewer restrictions on advertising and marketing than did their Western equivalents. As of 2001, forty nations required no warnings on cigarettes. Others permitted warnings in English, rather than the native language. Restrictions on advertising, where enacted, were often indifferently enforced. Few regulations governed the levels of tar in cigarettes, which were often higher than those sold in Western nations.

Alarm over this regulatory vacuum and the lethal, mounting consequences of smoking in developing nations has provoked an increasingly vocal public health response, a situation reminiscent of attempts to negotiate controls on the international narcotic traffic in the early twentieth century (a historical parallel that the industry's critics have not been shy about developing). Several international organizations, including the WHO, have proposed global treaties aimed at curtailing, or at least slowing, sales of cigarettes and other tobacco products. The highest profile effort has been the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), a comprehensive regulatory scheme that includes such provisions as restrictions on tobacco advertising, promotion, and sponsorship that target minors. In May 2003 the World Health Assembly adopted the FCTC; at this writing the treaty awaits ratification by member nations.