Cigarettes: they provide no nutrition and quench no thirst. They serve no purpose other than being an excuse to take a break from the grind before getting right back to it. And on top of that, they’re deadly. As far as American vices go, they might be at the top of the list. So how did they get and stay popular for so long? And why are they making a comeback?
This two-part episode dives into the rise of this quintessential American product, the science that proved it was dangerous, and the eventual reckoning that came from a mysterious box of documents—one delivered with the return address of an iconic cartoon character. Along the way, we’ll uncover what has driven so many Americans to risk their lives to light up despite what the science has told us.
Credits
Host: Alexis Pedrick
Executive Producer: Mariel Carr
Senior Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Sound Design: Seth Samuel
Fact-Checking: Alexandra Atiya
Resource List
ABC News. Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking. May 16, 1988.
Brandt, Allan M. The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America. Basic Books/Hachette Book Group, 2007.
CBS News. Smoking: “A health hazard of sufficient importance”
CBS News Extra. “On Smoking and Health” 1964.
Chesterfield Cigarette Commercial with Mason Adams.
C-SPAN. Congress Investigates: Tobacco Industry. 1994.
DOLL, R, and A B HILL. “Smoking and carcinoma of the lung; preliminary report.” British medical journal vol. 2,4682 (1950): 739-48. doi:10.1136/bmj.2.4682.739
Frontline, PBS. Tobacco on Trial. 1986.
Glantz, Stanton A., John Slade, Lisa A. Bero, Peter Hanauer, and Deborah E. Barnes.The Cigarette Papers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Glantz, Stanton A., “Stanton Glantz: Putting Cardiovascular, Epidemiological, Economic, Political, and Policy Research into Action at UC San Francisco and Beyond.” UC San Francisco Oral History Project. Interviews conducted by Paul Burnett in 2021 and 2022
Hoffman, David “How Americans Got Sold on Cigarettes”
Inside Edition. “Are Cigarettes Cool Again?” Inside Edition, 2026.
River of Gold-Tobacco. British Pathé, 1969
Showdown on Tobacco Road. UCSF Industry Documents Library, Truth Tobacco Industry Documents Library, Philip Morris Records, Master Settlement Agreement, November 1987
Smoother, Cooler Cigarette Commercials (1950s & ’60s)
Tobaccoland, USA. Produced by Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company, 1949.
Truth Tobacco Industry Documents Library, University of California San Francisco.
“Wild Stallions” Marlboro advertisement. 1970
Wynder EL, Graham EA. Landmark article May 27, 1950: Tobacco Smoking as a possible etiologic factor in bronchiogenic carcinoma. A study of six hundred and eighty-four proved cases. By Ernest L. Wynder and Evarts A. Graham. JAMA. 1985;253(20):2986-2994. doi:10.1001/jama.253.20.2986
Yeaman, A.. Implications Of Battelle Hippo I & II And The Grifffith Filter. UCSF Industry Documents Library, Truth Tobacco Industry Documents Library, UCSF Brown & Williamson Collection, 1963 July 17. Accessed: Sep 14, 2026. https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/docs/hrwh0097/.
1955 Lucky Strike Cigarettes Commercial, “LIGHT UP A LUCKY – ITS LIGHT UP TIME”
1963 Viceroy Cigarette Commercial, “Swingers”
Transcript – Part 1 (The Rise)
Alexis Pedrick: From the Science History Institute, I’m Alexis Pedrick. Welcome to the new season of Distillations: American Vice. Over the next eight episodes, we’re diving into stories about our appetite for risk, how science plays a role in it, and how it’s shaped the American experience.
First up, a story about the most American vice of all. It provides no nutrition. It quenches no thirst. It serves no purpose other than being an excuse to take a break from the grind and then get back to it.
Light Up a Lucky Ad: Relax, It’s light-up time…
Alexis Pedrick: I’m talking about the cigarette.
1963 Viceroy Ad: Shared a court with a couple we met, then took time out for a cigarette. Viceroy? That’s right!
Chesterfield Ad: Make your pleasure long, pleasure true, pleasure filter-free. Chesterfield…
Alexis Pedrick: We can laugh at these old ads now, because we’ve come a long way from being so happy-go-lucky about cigarettes. We know they’re poison now. You can’t smoke in restaurants or on airplanes or elevators. Americans just aren’t lighting up like they used to. At least that’s what we thought. But then we started noticing something.
Inside Edition: “Are Cigarettes Cool Again?”: Are cigarettes cool again? Sabrina Carpenter takes a drag in this music video…Jeremy Allen White’s character smokes up a storm in The Bear and Zendaya puffs on a cig in Euphoria. There’s even an Instagram account called “cigfluencers.”
Alexis Pedrick: And then there was this Instagram post that made our jaws drop.
Instagram Post – We Need to Smoke Again: We need to smoke again. If you’re young, you don’t understand this, but in the nineteen hundred and nineties, we smoked. We smoked all the time. We smoked cigarettes behind the school in our cars, at coffee shops. This was our stimulation.
Alexis Pedrick: And look, as someone who was a teenager in the 90s, I can confirm she’s not wrong. But does she not remember why we stopped smoking? Oh wait, she does.
Instagram Post – We Need to Smoke Again: The death thing is a problem. I acknowledge it being an obstacle here to my plan, but like, I mean, surely there’s a way around that, right? Like we can figure this out. We’re smart, we’re capable. How do we bring back a cigarette that doesn’t kill us?
Alexis Pedrick: Trying to wrap your head around that question? Same. So how did we get here? How did we go from cigarettes being a niche product when they debuted in the late 1800s to becoming the quintessential American product by the end of the 20th century? How did that happen despite the fact that cigarettes are poison? What was the thing that finally brought their rise crashing down? And why, why are they getting popular again?
Chapter One: How Do You Sell a Poison?
Alexis Pedrick: Before there were cigarettes, there was just a plant.
Tobaccoland USA: The aromatic annual called tobacco.
Alexis Pedrick: Humans started using tobacco shortly after they arrived in the Americas. Archaeologists have recovered seeds from an ancient hearth that are a little over 12,000 years old. And while we don’t know exactly what those Paleolithic campers were doing, researchers believe that the plant could have been smoked or put behind the lip and sucked. But that wasn’t the only early use. For centuries, indigenous Americans have used the plant for medicinal and spiritual purposes. And then, when Europeans arrived to colonize the Americas, they quickly turned it into a lucrative cash crop.
River of Gold: Tobacco is a crop that calls for care. From early spring, when the seeds are sown, to the time of harvesting the luscious leaves.
Alexis Pedrick: People smoked the leaves in pipes, or they rolled them into cigars and smoked those. And though it had many fans, tobacco also had critics from early on. In 1604, King James I described smoking tobacco as a custom “loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, and dangerous to the lungs.” Still, by 1670, half the men in England smoked it daily. Cigarettes, which literally just means little cigars, didn’t come along until the middle of the 19th century. They started taking off after inventor James Bonsack patented his game-changing cigarette rolling machine in 1880. Production remained pretty small-scale at first, but by the time we got further into the 20th century, things changed.
Allan Brandt: And people went from being able to produce a few thousand cigarettes in a day to being able to produce hundreds of thousands.
Alexis Pedrick: This is Allan Brandt, a historian of science and the author of The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America.
Allan Brandt: And that led the leaders of the tobacco industry to say, how are we going to sell this many? How can we invent and expand demand?
Alexis Pedrick: Before cigarettes, smoking was mostly relegated to just one part of 19th-century American society.
Allan Brandt: It was very much an elite male practice and behavior.
Alexis Pedrick: But when the mass production of cigarettes made tobacco cheaper and more accessible, suddenly, working-class boys started smoking, too. Still, despite the growing popularity of smoking in the U.S., there continued to be pockets of strong opposition. In the late 1800s, the cigarette was loathed by the same people fighting for the prohibition of alcohol. To them, both vices trafficked in the same evils: wastefulness, indulgence, and the willful poisoning of oneself and others.
Allan Brandt: Religious organizations made the case very strongly that smoking was a sign of bad character, and it was very bad for your health, and boys should really be restricted from it. And that’s kind of the eve of the 20th century.
Alexis Pedrick: Even though America had come a long way from its puritanical roots and the pastime of frowning upon worldly pleasures, the concept of leisure was still taboo.
Allan Brandt: The worst thing you can say about somebody, I think, in the late 19th century is that they were, you know, idle and pleasure-seeking. And here you had something with no purpose except for the enjoyment of individuals and groups.
Chesterfield Ad: You’ll find a man stops and takes big pleasure when and where he can. Chesterfield.
Oasis Ad: Oasis takes you away…welcome to sunny California! Oasis, fresh as a sunlit day…Oasis, cool as the sparkling spray…Oasis takes you away.
Alexis Pedrick: This struggle between cigarette-lovers and cigarette-haters continued through the first decade and a half of the 20th century, and there was real momentum behind banning or limiting the sale of cigarettes. By 1909, Kansas, Minnesota, South Dakota and Washington had all passed some sort of prohibition measure. But everything changed in 1917 when the U.S. entered World War One.
US Merchant Ship Archival: It came at last: war. Overnight, the cry was for ships and men, a bridge of ships across the Atlantic and the men to sail them.
Allan Brandt: And when the risk and divisions of our society become greater, and we’re living in a period of violence, division, uncertainty—that’s a better environment for selling tobacco and encouraging people to use it.
Alexis Pedrick: Suddenly, the risks of smoking paled in comparison to the risk of dying in a trench.
Allan Brandt: There was this idea like, there are so few pleasures, and smoking produces a short, immediate sense of pleasure and relaxation. Obviously, we’re in a time of great anxiety and violence.
Alexis Pedrick: Suddenly, it was a small comfort in an otherwise chaotic and scary world.
Allan Brandt: And so, for example, the Young Women’s Christian Association, which had always worked very stringently to prohibit smoking, suddenly starts collecting cigarettes and sending them to the American troops in France.
Alexis Pedrick: Buying cigarettes for troops became a patriotic act. The federal government even got in on the game at one point, claiming Bull Durham’s entire output for the military. By this point, if you were still an anti-cigarette crusader, you just seemed petty. As one 1919 opinion piece put it, “as for the poor fellows lying mangled in shell holes…with life slowly ebbing away from a body soon to become dreamless dust, who would be heartless enough to prohibit this last and only solace?”
Allan Brandt: I’ve always felt that that kind of 180 shift from, you know, essentially smoking being banned and prohibited in so many places to smoking being seen as positive, cool, manly.
Marlboro Wild Stallions Ad: You don’t see many wild stallions anymore… No, he’s one of the last of a wild and very singular breed. Come to where the flavor is. Come to Marlboro country.
Allan Brandt: Many American men came back from the First World War, you know, habitual addicted smokers.
Alexis Pedrick: War made smoking ubiquitous among American boys and men, but it took a more coordinated effort to get women hooked. It had long been a taboo for women to smoke, but cigarette companies realized they were missing out on half of the American market, so they decided to change the culture. In 1929, Lucky Strike tapped a man named Edward Bernays to do just that. Bernays was an early pioneer in public relations. Some call him the father of the field. He was crafty. He also happened to be the nephew of Sigmund Freud, which might have had something to do with why he consulted a psychoanalyst about his project.
Showdown on Tobacco Road: I went to Doctor Brill, and I said, can you tell me what cigarettes mean to women?
Alexis Pedrick: This is Bernays in a documentary called “Showdown on Tobacco Road.”
Showdown on Tobacco Road: He said cigarettes to women are torches of freedom. And they titillate the erogenous zones of the lips.
Alexis Pedrick: He also told Bernays that if he could find a way to connect cigarettes to the idea of challenging male power, then women would smoke because they—insert big sigh here—would have their own representation of an appendage. You get the idea.
Showdown on Tobacco Road: So I left and wondered what to do with that information.
Alexis Pedrick: Bernays hired a group of young women, specifying that they be good-looking but not “model-y”—according to his notes—to march in the New York Easter Parade. At his signal, they were to start smoking cigarettes. Bernays acted like the whole thing was completely spontaneous. And that’s how newspapers around the world reported it the next day.
Showdown on Tobacco Road: Within six weeks, smoking became an accepted pattern for women throughout the United States.
Alexis Pedrick: Bernays called this tactic the “engineering of consent.” The goal was to make it seem like the consumer had come up with the idea on their own, but really, he was in the background, pulling the strings. Cigarettes’ social acceptance and popularity continued to grow until, by the middle of the 20th century, cigarettes were everywhere. Even if we had the sense they weren’t great for us, there was no clear evidence to point to confirming that. But proof was coming.
Chapter Two: The Proof and the Conspiracy
Alexis Pedrick: There had always been people, especially doctors, who thought of course, smoking can’t be good for you.
Allan Brandt: But it’s very hard to separate that from the moral categorizations. Like, is it bad for you because we think it’s wasteful, you know, it makes your teeth yellow, or it smells in a funny way? But is this bad for everyone?
Alexis Pedrick: Before 1950, if a patient complained to their doctor of a chronic cough, it was common to be told that for some people smoking wasn’t healthy.
Allan Brandt: And that’s a radical difference than saying smoking causes lung cancer.
Alexis Pedrick: But then in 1950 two studies came out, one after the other, showing that cigarettes likely caused lung cancer. The first was co-authored by an American surgeon and a medical student in Saint Louis, Evarts Graham and Ernst Wynder. By necessity, they had to take a creative approach.
Allan Brandt: It’s almost certainly unethical to say to two groups of, you know, 12-year-olds: half of you are going to become smokers, half of you are not, and in 30 years, we’ll see what your health is like.
Alexis Pedrick: Yeah. No one was going to sign up for a study like that. So they had to figure out another way. And that other way turned out to be looking backwards.
Allan Brandt: And so they would find people with lung cancer, and they would say: you know, did you smoke or didn’t you smoke?
Alexis Pedrick: Graham and Wynder collected extensive data on 684 lung cancer patients across the United States. And it turned out that smokers made up a large percentage of the group. Not only that, but the sharp increase in lung cancer rates also followed the same line as the increase in smoking. The second study was conducted by two British medical statisticians, A. Bradford Hill and Richard Doll. And it also had a unique approach.
Allan Brandt: They were really interested in statistics, and they were really prepared to build a model for how we think about causality, not just for cigarettes, but for other environmental toxins for other products.
Alexis Pedrick: But there was a problem with both of these studies. They were really different from how we studied infectious diseases. This wasn’t like looking at tuberculosis, for example, where you could isolate a bacterium under a microscope. These studies couldn’t be conducted in a lab, and they didn’t address what in cigarettes was causing lung cancer.
Allan Brandt: And so, a lot of people would say: well, you know, all of the statistics are really pretty meaningless. We don’t really know, and we won’t know until we know what it is in the cigarette that changes the cell.
Alexis Pedrick: It was a convenient argument for cigarette companies who wanted to keep selling cigarettes. But Allan Brandt argues that the evidence of danger was clear, and that should have been enough.
Allan Brandt: I sometimes compare this to taking the pump off the handle during the cholera epidemics of the 1850s. You know, you could say: we don’t know what’s in the water, but we better stop drinking that water now because we understand that cholera is coming from this particular well. And you know, how much information do you need? But there were people who said: this kind of information is faulty to begin with. And of course, that’s the essential argument that the tobacco companies took for many, many years.
Alexis Pedrick: Wynder and Graham were aware of the merely statistical critique of their study. But it didn’t stop their work. In fact, they backed up their claims with a lab study where they spent a year painting mice with tobacco tar. In the end, 44% of the mice developed cancer. They went public with the results on November 30th, 1953. TIME magazine wrote that the case against tobacco had now been proven beyond any doubt. A couple of weeks later, on December 13th, their landmark study was published in the journal Cancer Research.
The response from cigarette companies was immediate, but also secret. You see, the very next day, CEOs from the six largest tobacco manufacturers in the U.S. met at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, where they privately freaked out, and then made a plan. Beneath the Plaza’s chandeliers, in a scene straight out of a mobster movie, the most powerful tobacco tycoons in the world hatched a conspiracy to publicly deny smoking’s hazards and defraud the American people.
Allan Brandt: They hire a really great public relations expert, one of the giants of the 20th century named John Hill. And he essentially says to them: you know, you don’t like the science that’s coming out, and it’s going to hurt your industry across all the companies. If you don’t like their science, get your own science.
Alexis Pedrick: And believe me, they tried, but their own science didn’t say anything different.
Allan Brandt: So the companies did something very clever. They said: we need more research. This is unresolved. And so people were able to use uncertainty as a defense for continuing to smoke.
Alexis Pedrick: From this point forward, the industry would focus on one word: doubt. After that Plaza Hotel meeting, the tobacco CEOs decided to form the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, or TIRC. Publicly, it was advertised as a research arm of the tobacco companies trying to get to the bottom of the issue.
Smoking: A Health Hazard of Sufficient Importance: If there are bad elements, through our laboratories, through acts of God and luck, we hope we may find them. And if they are found, they will be removed.
Alexis Pedrick: But the TIRC was really a PR machine spinning the wheels of uncertainty.
Smoking: A Health Hazard of Sufficient Importance: But at this point we do not know.
Alexis Pedrick: As the years went on, cigarette companies repeated this claim over and over again, despite a growing mountain of evidence that said otherwise. In 1964, the Surgeon General gave his damning report on the dangers of cigarettes.
1964 Surgeon General Report: Cigarette smoking is a health hazard of sufficient importance to the United States to warrant remedial action. Cigarette smoking contributes substantially to mortality from certain specific diseases and to the overall death rate.
Alexis Pedrick: The reaction was immediate. The following clip is from an interview with a man who was in the audience.
How Americans Got Sold on Cigarettes: Smoking in auditoriums was universal in those days. In fact, there were ashtrays on the back of each seat. But as the two hours wore on, you could see cigarettes going out all over the room. Cigarette smoking declined immediately and abruptly, and this was a worldwide phenomenon. It was the Great Forswearing, which was followed a week or two later by the Great Relapse, and cigarette sales went right back to where they had been before.
How Americans Got Sold on Cigarettes: There was this assumption, I think, at the time of the ’64 report: let’s tell people it’s dangerous. People are intelligent. They’ll quit.
Alexis Pedrick: This is Allan Brandt from that same documentary.
How Americans Got Sold on Cigarettes: What we found at that moment when we really said smoking causes harm was that it was very difficult to quit. And this led to a full reevaluation of what was the nature of cigarette smoking. Was it a habit? Was it an addiction?
Alexis Pedrick: It was an important distinction, because a habit is a choice, but an addiction, by definition, is not. So you can guess which one the cigarette companies went with. They did everything in their power to make sure cigarettes embody what is arguably the most American of values: personal freedom. And personal freedom’s flipside: personal responsibility. And so, the quintessential American industry used the quintessential American value as a shield to protect itself from accusations that cigarettes were killing people.
Allan Brandt: The tobacco industry was quite effective at talking out of at least two sides of its mouth for a very long time. So they sort of say, first, we want you to know—and we’ve been investigating this—we know of nothing in cigarettes that could cause cancer. If they admitted that it was harmful, that would be the end of the industry, okay? And then they say, you should also know it’s entirely up to you whether you smoke or not.
Alexis Pedrick: Cigarettes are safe. But even if they aren’t, you can’t blame us if you get sick because it was your own choice to smoke. It was a nice accompaniment to doubt. So even when we get to the 80s and there was a consensus that cigarettes were addictive because of nicotine—
1988 Surgeon General Report on Smoking: The Surgeon General’s report released this morning is the 20th dealing with the health effects of smoking. One: tobacco is addictive. Two: nicotine is the ingredient in tobacco that causes addiction. And three: tobacco addiction is similar in many respects to addiction to alcohol, heroin, and cocaine.
Alexis Pedrick: Publicly, the companies described nicotine like an afterthought—it just happened to be in tobacco. Or they said it helped with flavor. But no cigarette executive ever openly admitted the truth that nicotine was the drug that cigarettes deliver—that it was the whole point of smoking. In 1994, the CEOs of seven tobacco companies testified under oath on the question of nicotine and addiction before Congress.
1994 Tobacco CEOs Testify before Congress: I’d like to just go down the row, whether each of you believes that nicotine is not addictive. Just yes or no. Do you believe nicotine is not addictive?
1994 Tobacco CEOs Testify before Congress: I believe nicotine is not addictive. Yes.
1994 Tobacco CEOs Testify before Congress: Mr. Johnston.
1994 Tobacco CEOs Testify before Congress: Congressman, cigarettes and nicotine clearly do not meet the classic definitions of addiction. There is no intoxication.
1994 Tobacco CEOs Testify before Congress: We’ll take that as a no. And again, time is short. If you could just, I think each of you believe nicotine is not addictive; we just would like to have this for the record.
Alexis Pedrick: One by one they answered in the negative:
1994 Tobacco CEOs Testify before Congress: I believe nicotine is not addictive.
Alexis Pedrick: Nicotine is not addictive. Case closed. But—and there is a but—we told you the story was about the rise and fall of cigarettes. Something was about to turn all those wins for the cigarette industry into liabilities. And we’ll get into it in part two dropping on September 22nd.
Alexis Pedrick: When a mysterious box was delivered to an office at the UC San Francisco Medical School—
Stanton Glantz: The return address was Mr. Butts, the Doonesbury cartoon character.
Alexis Pedrick: One unlikely man found himself on the front lines of the war against Big Tobacco.
Stanton Glantz: They said, boy, you have just the perfect credentials if you had a decent suit, because at that point the only suit I had was orange. And they didn’t think that would play too well on television. So they went out and picked out a suit for me, and that’s how my career got launched.
Alexis Pedrick: And the dominoes would start to fall.
Stanton Glantz: The thing that was most important overall was that it was the industry speaking in its own words. You know, when I first got the box and looked through it, the thing that struck me just immediately was that, boy, you know, all these things we thought about these guys are true. In fact, it was even worse than a lot of the things we thought.
Alexis Pedrick: Tune in next week to Cigarettes in America, Part Two: The Reckoning.
Alexis Pedrick: Distillations podcast is produced by the Science History Institute and recorded in the Laurie J. Landau Digital Production Studios. Our executive producer is Mariel Carr. Our senior producer is Rigoberto Hernandez. This episode was produced by Mariel Carr. It was fact-checked by Alexandra Atiya, and the sound design was done by Seth Samuel.
Support for Distillations has been provided by the Middleton Foundation and the Wyncote Foundation.
You can find all of our podcasts, as well as our videos and articles, on our website at sciencehistory.org, and you can follow us on social media @scihistoryorg for news about our podcast and everything else going on in our free museum and library.
For Distillations, I’m Alexis Pedrick. Thanks for listening.
