Cigarettes used to be ubiquitous. Now, if you buy a pack, so are the pictures of the open-mouthed woman, her teeth like crooked, yellow Chiclets in a bed of nicotine-stained gums. “When you smoke it shows,” her label warns, but it’s basically a given that in 2020, you know this.
Far fewer people smoke now than did in the 1960s, back when you had free reign to light up at work, in bars and even on airplanes.
But the drop from half of Canadians smoking in 1965 to less than 16 per cent in 2018 didn’t just happen. When a federal minister first declared that smoking causes lung cancer in 1963, the industry pushed back.
Hard. They said: “This ‘evidence’ was and remains inconclusive, no matter how often it is repeated and restated.” In 1979, when