The Cigarette Century Analysis

The Cigarette Century

From flappers to movie stars, cigarettes became an integral, flexible prop. Cigarettes are a familiar part of the American culture and have been for hundreds of years. Allan M. Brandt author of the book The Cigarette Century, states, “Cigarettes are the product that defined America.” Cigarettes became a popular modern commodity as consumer beliefs developed. The product intertwined and blossomed with the development of American business, advertisement, and consumerism in the modern age. As cigarette consumption skyrocketed, evidence that cigarette smoking, and second hand smoke was dangerous was yet to emerge. Knowledge of the health effects has since had a complex effect on the public and the industry. American policy, industry strategy, and lawsuits concerning cigarettes have all provided windows into governments, industry, and public confrontation with risk, freedom, responsibility, and blame over the course of the last hundred years. Thus is why all Americans have a bias towards cigarette smoke, tobacco companies and products, and because of this, the product oftentimes has an ethical position-somewhat contradictory, as being both a leading cause of cancer and as an appealing product to some.
The book encompasses five well thought out chapters that
include: culture, science, politics, law and globalization. Once a rare habit in the 1900’s (only 2% of Americans who consumed tobacco smoked cigarettes), “the cigarette would provide the essential vehicle for tobaccos transition from plantation crop to consumer product,” (p. 19) and smoking would quickly became a new fad by the 1950’s (by 1952, 81% of tobacco consumers smoked cigarettes). The first chapter portrays the cigarette industry as a sly corporation being able to create the need for its product among naive Americans. With the development of the Bonsack Machine in the 1880’s, mass production of cigarettes began, and with a combination of technology to produce multiple tobacco sticks, scheming publicity and lobbying the industry to attract smokers they were able to produce plentiful and cheap cigarettes! A success, one might call it.
Of course, why wouldn’t Americans try this new high-end item on the market? Cigarettes at this point in time where cheap, legal and socially acceptable, women in advertisement made smoking look “cool” and “glamourous”, some men might even add that women looked more sophisticated. I remember growing up as a child, there were candied cigarettes, and my parents would buy them for me and my sister and we at age 6 would pretend to smoke these fake cigarettes. We thought at the time we looked cool, and wanted to be just like the older kids, plus our parents did it, it was a norm to us. As cigarette producers continued to make the emerging product, modern advertising and national brands continues to develop, which helped the promotion of this new phenomenon.
More Americans also began moving more into the cities and there was a mass shift from agricultural to factory jobs, making the cigarette fit well into the more disciplined schedule of the factory jobs. Author Allan Brandt claims that the innovators who made the cigarettes overwhelming popular did not predict how successful they would be, “Not only had cigarettes displaced all other forms of tobacco use; total consumption of tobacco increased dramatically in the first half of the twentieth century,” (pg
97).
The Cigarette Century greatly identifies the science between the harmful effects of tobacco smoke and our health. “Almost all the risks that would later come to be attributed to smoking had been well documented by clinicians in the first decade of the century. Even the risks of passive exposure to cigarette smoke had been well articulated. Yet physicians and researchers could not move from such clinical observations to more powerful and generalizable assessments of the relationship of smoking to disease. Surgeons like Alton Ochsner, a New Orleans chest surgeon who became an anti-tobacco advocate might as well be convinced that tobacco had caused their patients malignancies, but their observations could never settle the larger question of causes and effect,”(pg 128).
As the cigarette gained in popularity and became a global American product, its harms were unclear. It’s hard for any of us to imagine not knowing that cigarettes were harmful. Even now, when we all know its dangers and the harm it brings to those who might be recipients of second hand smoke. Especially if we smoke a cigarette or two today, the noticeable harm won’t emerge for decades. Today’s harm is much easier to sidestep than harm three decades from now, in an unimaginable part of our lives. But the challenge of coming to terms with a harm that only develops over time is hard to rationalize. Cigarettes illustrate the much larger theme of the so-called mortality transition that occurred in the U.S. in the mid-twentieth century.
From emphysema and asthma to lung cancer and heart disease, the effects of smoking can be dangerous to us all. That’s why in 2009 when Oregon decided to put the Indoor Clear Air Act into effect I couldn’t have been happier. I suffer from asthma, and when I am around cigarette smoke, I got into what I call these coughing spells, which then lead me to use my emergency inhaler that helps get these coughing spells under control. I remember one time, I was out to dinner with my family (this is when you could smoke in restaurants), and I started coughing so bad, having an asthma attack, my mom had to take me to Urgent Care because my inhaler wasn’t even able to help control my coughing spell. It was awful, I wasn’t able to catch my breath, and I was bright red in the face from coughing so hard. From that time on, I was so scared to go into restaurants in fear of another Urgent Care visit, until they passed the Indoor Clear Air Act, now I can eat at any restaurant without the fear of having an asthma attack! In the twentieth century, all aspects of the American life also affected the air Americans breathed. The process of concluding that cigarettes were the culprit was therefore difficult. From the early twentieth century, when most Americans died of infectious disease, to the mid-twentieth century when most died of chronic disease, the tools to understand causes of death and American perceptions of health also needed to shift. As skeptical scientists began to notice an unprecedented rise in lung cancer in the 1940s they searched for an explanation and the scientific tools were different from those used to understand and combat infectious disease. Instead of microscopes, antibiotics, and vaccines that had brought public confidence in medicine, less accepted tools were needed to understand and address lung cancer. Here, too cigarette smoking spearheaded a broader understanding both of causes of death and of science. This research marked the beginning of understanding risk factors as a cause of morbidity and mortality and an opportunity for population based epidemiological research to become a vital center of medical research. Although this research was successful and clearly demonstrated the harms of cigarettes, public and governmental acknowledgement and understanding of this harm took much longer.
Despite the harmful effects and rising costs in tobacco products, tobacco companies are still producing mass amounts of these little sticks and are still being sold worldwide. At this point the FDA is regulating cigarettes in the U.S. although with some limitations in what the FDA can actually do, for example ensuring tobacco companies having warning labels on their products that their product can cause cancer and may be addictive. In conclusion, I don’t see the cigarette century going away anytime fast. However, their cultural position has been significantly altered compared to the 1950’s.

Works Cited
Brandt, A. M. (2007). The Cigarette Century. New York: Basic Books.
FDA. (2014, July 8). Tobacco Products. Retrieved July 11, 2014, from U.S. Food and Drug Administration: http://www.fda.gov/TobaccoProducts/default.htm?utm_campaign=Google2&utm_source=fdaSearch&utm_medium=website&utm_term=tobacco&utm_content=1
WHO. (2014). WHO FCTC Health Warning Database. Retrieved July 11, 2014, from World Health Organization: http://www.who.int/tobacco/healthwarningsdatabase/en/