Tobacco In The 20th Century

Tobacco, as it is often smoked today, is largely derived from the Nicotiana tabacum plant, a broad-leafed herb native to the Americas. Pipes, Snuff, and chewing tobacco were the most common forms of tools people used for tobacco in the twentieth century. Smoking cigarettes wasn’t popular until the nineteenth century. An invention was made before cigarettes became popular, in 1884 there was this machine made called “Bonsack rolling machine” it gave a taste to tobacco and also made it easier to inhale. In 1964, the United States Surgeon General’s had a report on smoking declaring cigarettes is a major source of health hazards, promoting a decline in U.S. cigarette consumption. In 1994 only about one in four Americans over the age of sixteen was

Tobacco ads were banned on American television in 1970. The U.S congress banned smoking on airline flights of less than two hours in 1988, and in 1990 this was extended to all domestic flights. Anti-smoking policies were strengthened in the 1990s. Smoking today is generally regarded as the cause of a global cancer epidemic. Smoking kills about half a million Americans every year- mainly from heart attacks and cancer. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg noted that while 14,000 deaths were related to tobacco each day, little funding went to fight tobacco use and its medical complications. . Lung cancer killed more Americans than any other type of malignancy, causing some 160,000 deaths a year during the decade—more than breast, colon, and prostate cancer combined. While some cases of lung cancer occurred in nonsmokers, at least 87 percent were associated with cigarette smoking. “If you smoke a pack a day for 20 years or more, you have a 50 percent chance of dying from smoke-related disease.” Some companies adopted a more forceful policy: for example, workers at Weyco, a health-benefits administrator in Okemos, Michigan, could be fired for smoking on or off the job. Such businesses noted that smokers had a higher rate of medical complications and missed more work than nonsmokers. Over 500,000 deaths attributed to illnesses related to second-hand smoke