• LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    Even though tobacco came from the Americas, cigarettes weren’t all that popular in the US until WWI when they were included in soldiers’ rations.

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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      5 days ago

      Interesting, I hadn’t heard that. Was it taking over from other forms of tobacco, maybe? Cigarettes definitely are easy to manufacture and smoke, compared to the other ones I can think of.

      • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        I forget where I read it - or it might have been in a documentary. In the US smoking was mainly a rural or cowboy thing until WWI. It saw another big surge after WWII.

        Maybe related, marijuana use was also mostly a rural thing until the “reefer madness” ad campaign misrepresented it as a big-city evil, which backfired and popularized it.