Today’s dumb idea is not smoking. I don’t blame smokers for their addiction, even those who started yesterday. The dumb idea is that experts only discovered tobacco’s health effects in modern times. When do you think the hazards of tobacco were revealed? With the Surgeon General’s report in 1964? Maybe 1944? Keep going back.
Evidence of tobacco’s devastating effects reach far into the past. I found 200 published reports between 1602 and 1799. In 1604 King James published his “Counterblaste to Tobacco,” condemning smoking as “dangerous to the lungs.” That’s 1604.
In 1796, New York essayist Tyrunculus said “There is nothing, perhaps, more pernicious, or more destructive to the health of man, than the present practice of segar smoaking.” He condemned second-hand smoke as an “unpardonable insult.”
An explosion of research began in 1829, when cigarettes’ addictive properties were discovered. Tobacco was first linked to fatal cancers in 1837. By 1890 everyone knew the meaning of the phrase “coffin nails.”
Then in 1928 the brilliant Argentinian doctor Ángel Roffo proved that smoking causes the vast majority of lung cancers; that benzopyrene in tobacco tar creates runaway mutations in lung tissue. But Dr. Roffo’s well publicized research couldn’t overcome addiction and advertising. By the 1960s more than forty percent of American adults smoked daily. Cigarettes took both of my parents and all four grandparents. Mom and Dad died so young, they never met my daughter.
Why has smoking persisted for 500+ years despite all this evidence? Hype, inertia, and lots of money. Smoking is hazardous to your health, but that isn’t news. Tell friends you heard it here last.
I’m Jeff Gentry
Best reference:
Proctor, R. N. (2006). Angel H Roffo: the forgotten father of experimental tobacco carcinogenesis. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 84(6), 494–496. https://doi.org/10.2471/BLT.06.031682
Dumb Ideas that Changed the World copyright 2025 by Jeff Gentry. All rights reserved.
