7 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
How was it not super obvious when humans have been smoking for thousands of years?
Comment by Dorocche at 08/08/2022 at 14:55 UTC*
14 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Humans have not been smoking for thousands of years in the way you're imagining it.
Native Americans have consumed tobacco smoke for millennia in religious rituals that don't closely resemble cigarettes. Europeans have been smoking on a small scale for a few hundred years-- and cigars got a reputation as "dangerous for the lungs" and "coffin nails" almost immediately, although it was less actual knowledge yet and more a gut reaction to how disgusting it smells (and how disgusting they considered the indigenous people they got it from).
Cigarettes weren't socially acceptable until the 1910s, and they're what enabled mass chain smoking as we know it today, especially in the decades afterwards where it became vogue to flavor them and make them smoother and easier to smoke. Studies came out that it was lethal within 20 years (corporate propaganda notwithstanding).