The Moment The Tide Turned On Smoking

People buy vape supplies, juice and pens for many reasons, from enjoying particular flavours, making huge clouds of vapour or to stop smoking.

Along with other aids to help people quit tobacco, e-cigarettes have been positioned as an effective way to transition away from cigarettes, with a 2019 study cited by the NHS suggesting that people who used them were twice as likely to succeed as those who used nicotine gum or patches.

For many, if not most of us, the idea that smoking was ever acceptable is a relic of a very distant past, but there was a very specific moment where the idea that smoking was a healthy, enjoyable and positive social trait to have changed dramatically.

Whilst there has been opposition to smoking ever since tobacco was first exported from the Americas, primarily on moral, socio-economic (tobacco plants were grown in place of food, for instance) or religious grounds.

Whist they eventually turned out to be correct, they were effectively right for the wrong reasons, and it would take until 1912 for the first study to suggest that smoking could lead to lung cancer.

However, at the time the latter was a disease so rare that doctors could often go through their entire careers without ever seeing it, the warning was not followed, and cigarette smoking increased dramatically throughout the first half of the 20th century, especially in the UK and US (but not Germany).

Cigarettes were sometimes even advertised as good for people, akin to the similarly debunked in hindsight ‘Guinness Is Good For You’ advertising campaign, and even promoted as health aids in the US.

This all changed with a series of studies published by epidemiologist Sir Richard Doll from 1948 onwards that demonstrated with considerable evidence that smoking could cause major health damage, including confirming that earlier ling to lung cancer.

This led to a change in how cigarettes and smokers were portrayed, starting with a ban on television adverts in 1965 and a near-total ban on advertising in the Tobacco Advertising and Promotion Act 2002.

Sports sponsorship was the last to go, with a ban on Formula 1 and sports sponsorship coming into force in 2005.