Never Start!
I recently saw a sign that proclaimed:
It made me consider why I never started . . . and why my parents did.
I was a senior in high when the Surgeon General's report on smoking was issued in 1964. Research generally supports the fact that peer pressure was and still is the most important factor in adolescents beginning to smoke. People who start in adolescence become the most severely hooked in adulthood.
I was a loner in high school, mostly because I skipped my sophomore year of high school and moved to a new school in a new state for my junior year. I had friends at school but the only kids I hung out with was those who were on the swim team. No smokers there--we were in the water all the time.
I also started wearing contact lens when I was 14 and smoke bothered my eyes a lot. It was difficult to be around my parents and to go to most public spaces since everyone was smoking indoors in those days.
But I think the main reason I had no desire to start was one of my assigned housekeeping tasks at home--cleaning ashtrays. The smell of wet ashes was so offensive to me that it made me gag. So my parents found the best preventative!
They were both lifetime smokers. Although they tried to quit many times, they stopped only when my mother became ill (eventually fatally) with throat cancer. My dad died a few years later, mostly from COPD.
In the twenties and thirties, some still felt smoking had health benefits. And certainly until the Surgeon General's report and subsequent legislation, smoking was seen as modern and glamorous.
Print and media ads and motion pictures showed beautiful men and women smoking. Doesn't it seem odd now to see everyone smoking in those old movies? My father was in the Navy from when he joined at age 17 until he retired in 1969. Just as tobacco companies pushed smoking among the general public, the companies also concentrated on a huge captive audience in the military. In World War I, cigarettes were part of the standard ration kit for all allied soldiers. FDR made tobacco a protected crop during World War II. A claim that I cannot verify states that cigarette smoking increased 75% from 1940 to 1945.
When I worked in the base PX in the mid-1960s, cigarettes were quite cheap compared to regular store prices (I recall 20 cents per pack and $2 per case.). Even today, although the military no longer encourages smoking, cigarette use is much higher among military compared to the general population.
It is hard to remember the days when restaurants had ashtrays on every table and a haze of smoke filled the room. There was the intermediate step of non-smoking rooms in restaurants that were not that effective in separating people from the smoke. Now when I see one or two people standing outside a restaurant smoking, I feel sorry that they are hooked but happy they are outside.
The fifty-year anniversary of the Surgeon General's report was 2014. The 2014 report noted that smoking was down from 42% of the population in 1965 to 18% in 2012. However, the report pointed out that one-half million people in the U.S. die prematurely because of smoking. With the opioid epidemic grabbing so much attention, smoking does not command much attention. But Americans and others worldwide continue to pay the price for smoking.
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