The popular decline of the cigarette
No apologies to Humphrey Bogart, who helped glamorize the cigarette as a key prop in mid-20th century tough-minded masculinity. It wasn’t just him, of course. Marlene Dietrich and Audrey Hepburn gave it womanly worldliness, and James Dean made it a symbol of reckless youth. Smoking on screen was actually written into the actors’ contracts, through deals struck by tobacco companies with the studios.
But the glamor is long gone. The percentage of Americans who smoked cigarettes in 2024 for the first time dropped below 10 percent. In 1954, 45 percent of Americans identified themselves as smokers. In 1963, Americans smoked 12 cigarettes a day for every adult in the country. The following year, the Surgeon General’s report came out linking cigarette smoking with lung cancer. Since that time, both smoking and lung cancer have been in decline.
In the past few years, cigar smoking and electronic-cigarette use (vaping) have been flat, but e-cigarette use is declining among the youngest adults, raising hope that it too may be headed for the margins.
Sources: NEJM Evidence, Gizmodo, Gallup, Tobacco Policy Center