What the Hell Was Going on with Cigarette Ads in the 70s? (2024)
27 points by Vasbarlog 3 hours ago | 51 comments

ViktorRay 2 hours ago
It's so strange sometimes watching tv shows and movies from the 90's where you see characters smoking indoors in public places.

Like in Seinfeld you will have episodes where Kramer is smoking in offices....and even in the doctor's clinic! There was an episode where Kramer took out a cigar and smoked in a doctor's waiting room. I thought he would immediately get in trouble but none of the other characters cared.

And then you got movies from back then like Jackie Brown (which is a great movie by the way) where you see character's smoking in a mall cafeteria. A mall! A family friendly environment! And it's considered normal!?!?!? Blows my mind.

reply
socalgal2 2 minutes ago
You can still smoke indoors in public places in many places in the world
reply
acc348 8 minutes ago
I was recently watching some TV show and there was this one scene in maternity hospital. The doctor(!) was smoking while talking to the main character. Insane for today's standards.
reply
cjrp 2 hours ago
Smoking on airplanes is the one that just seemed like an accident waiting to happen. And yet there were (relatively) few incidents caused by cigarettes.
reply
black_knight 55 minutes ago
I heard that air quality on planes was better back then (maybe someone who was alive then can confirm). Because of smoking they had to ventilate the whole aircraft much better. While these days I feel like they are just starving us for oxygen so as to not have to heat up fresh air.
reply
michaelbuckbee 21 minutes ago
Old person here. I think it's really hard to convey the extent to which smoke literally permeated everything. It's not just the immediate air quality aspects of it, but there was just a residue on all the surfaces, every cushion and fabric held onto the stuff.

I can recall the week that no-smoking indoors at restaurants/bars passed and it was literally shocking to walk into a place and not have it be hazy. It really felt weird.

Anyway, air quality + quality of life was much worse. Sometimes the future does get better.

reply
chris_st 48 minutes ago
Nope, not better quality if you don't like the smell of cigarettes.
reply
05 49 minutes ago
Turns out using less engine bleed air is good for fuel economy, so now it's 50% recirculated HEPA filtered (which does nothing for the co2 contents) air.
reply
xattt 35 minutes ago
How does this work for all-electric planes like the 787?
reply
phs318u 45 minutes ago
Lol. I was 14 when I took a long distance international flight on a 747 in 1979. The family was sitting in the “non-smoking section”. I can tell you for a fact that the air quality in that plane was terrible. Possibly because a number of passengers in the non-smoking section still deigned to smoke. Whaddaya do eh?
reply
vintermann 38 minutes ago
There seems to be a door smoker effect to this day, where smokers are drawn to smoke just inside of the areas you aren't supposed to smoke.
reply
m-i-l 46 minutes ago
Or smoking a cigar in an oxygen rich spacecraft cabin, as per the opening scene of the original Planet of the Apes (released in Feb 1968, after the Apollo 1 fire in Jan 1967).
reply
js2 48 minutes ago
"You're too young to smoke. You're going to set this whole place on fire."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ma_XNn1bwOM

https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/2620/how-do-they-...

reply
petesergeant 2 hours ago
I remember transatlantic flights with smoking sections
reply
ArnoVW 48 minutes ago
The day they introduced non smoking (late nineties?) a friend of mine found out as the aeroport. He made a big stink, canceled his ticket and booked a new flight for Amsterdam - NYC with the only company still allowing smoking: Aeroflot.

He spent the better part of a day, flying via Moscow.

The next time he had to fly he grudgingly accepted it.

Sometimes even Shaw's unreasonable man has to come to terms with defeat.

reply
notabotiswear 2 hours ago
Airplane!, 1980.
reply
CodeCompost 52 minutes ago
Quit smoking 10 years ago. Best thing I ever did. I'm particularly inspired by articles like this:

* https://www.webmd.com/smoking-cessation/what-happens-body-qu...

According to the article I have 5 years to go till my body has completely recovered from the effects of smoking.

reply
anygivnthursday 23 minutes ago
Congrats! I quit around the same time cca 2012-2014.

I did not smoke on a plane, but smoking on trains (and many places indoor) was "normal" before like 2010 around my place. I did not like it even as a smoker and rather went out.

But fully echo you that quitting was one of the best decisions of my life.

reply
0rbiter 15 minutes ago
And there I was wondering where all the bunkum came from that LLMs spit out. This is proof that we don't need AI to write hilariously absurd copy.
reply
markyc 2 hours ago
what will our grand kids be shocked to read about us and our acceptable 'cigarettes'?

plastic everywhere

social media as news

teflon

fossil fuel cars

sugar/ultra-processed food

reply
kuerbel 52 minutes ago
Not only teflon, but pfas. Overuse of pesticides. The second coming of authoritarianism 80 years after the last time. Not doing enough about climate change. Anthropocene extinction.
reply
tialaramex 32 minutes ago
Yeah, Nazis again surprised me and I'm not even a young person.

I figured sure it's a pattern, but it'll take like 150 years or something, nope, here we are in less than 100 years and there are Nazis again.

reply
silvestrov 47 minutes ago
> plastic everywhere.

plastic will still be everywhere. The major catastrophe that could happen is for evolution of plastic eating bacteria like the creation of (dead) wood eating bacteria. Look at all the plastic containers etc you have in your kitchen and imagine it's just gone.

> social media as news

Mainstream news isn't going to get any better.

> teflon

teflon has gotten a lot better since it was introduced. It will stick around.

> fossil fuel cars

will be seen like rotary phones: they will not understand why they are so cumbersome or why so many people had resistance against electric cars. It's like electric lights versus living with only oil/candle lights.

I think a near term would be: "you had to go to a cinema to watch a movie?"

reply
phs318u 39 minutes ago
> Mainstream news isn't going to get any better.

Perhaps. But “social media as news” is definitely going to get a lot worse.

> Teflon ... It will stick around.

Please tell me that was a deliberate choice of words :)

reply
Pay08 2 hours ago
No, it's going to be about either the roll back of nuclear reactors or various social movements.
reply
petesergeant 2 hours ago
Meat not as a treat, but as a staple
reply
nxm 4 minutes ago
Huh? As has been the case since our species evolved into homosapiens?
reply
throw9393ir 2 hours ago
Perhaps overuse of medication. No real proof it works, severe side effects, "misterious" rise in cancer and other dissieases, state sanctioned censorship, billion dolar corruption scandals...
reply
kortilla 55 minutes ago
Medication for normal emotions
reply
nxm 40 minutes ago
Covid vaccines to young and healthy individuals
reply
autoexec 39 minutes ago
Thanks for reminding me. Hopefully antivaxxers
reply
notahacker 2 hours ago
Reminds me of reading my grandparents' old copies of National Geographic from a similar era. The ads were all attractively retro cars or cigarettes. A couple of taglines that stick in the mind are "the thinking man smokes" and "doctors recommend..."!
reply
ffaser5gxlsll 30 minutes ago
Press page-down: scrolls the galleries right. Somebody thought this was a good idea, let alone intuitive.
reply
lmm 2 hours ago
"Error establishing a database connection", apparently? Groovy.
reply
noelwelsh 2 hours ago
> Groovy

PHP / Wordpress I think.

reply
jonplackett 2 hours ago
Hug of death
reply
Vasbarlog 43 minutes ago
Works now!
reply
juleiie 24 minutes ago
I miss this awful habit so much.

Ever since quitting years ago I never really recovered. It’s like 35% of my mental focus and clarity evaporated.

All these moments when something had to be figured out suddenly things became easy if you only went for a smoke. Solutions became crystal clear obvious and effortless.

At a price.

Without it is always like a little bit of heavy fog is obscuring everything. That I know could be instantly lifted by this terrible drug.

I even remember my first time what a transcendental clarity it summoned. It was as if some thick veil fell from me in an instant. That’s very, very addicting and just useful.

reply
felooboolooomba 32 minutes ago
They didn't have a scientific proof that smoking was bad for you. Just like we don't have the proof that social media is awful for you and that Trump is a cult.
reply
Vasbarlog 8 minutes ago
Cigarettes were recognised as the cause of lung cancer in the 1940s and 1950s, with the confluence of studies from epidemiology, animal experiments, cellular pathology and chemical analytics

https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/21/2/87

reply
cindyllm 29 minutes ago
[dead]
reply
bramgn 2 hours ago
and yet somehow that world seemed more healthy than today's
reply
narag 16 minutes ago
What seems to me is the ads seem less staged and processed than current ones. They're wilder and not as softened as every media are now.

As for people pointing at lifespans for the healthy part, how much of the change is systemic use of anticoagulants? And of course less tobacco, but I wouldn't rush to say people are in much better shape now.

reply
Vasbarlog 36 minutes ago
If you wear your nostalgia glasses it sure does "seem" more healthy. Life expectancy at birth in the 70s was 70.8. Now it's 79.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/hus/data-finder.htm?&subject=Life%2...

reply
phs318u 38 minutes ago
“Seemed” is the key word here.
reply
Pay08 2 hours ago
It wasn't. Lifespans were almost a decade shorter.
reply
TurdF3rguson 2 hours ago
Is it about how Joe Camel looks like a cock?
reply
Vasbarlog 2 hours ago
Nope!
reply
pixel_popping 2 hours ago
Someone forgot to code a 5-liner RAM cache.
reply
Vasbarlog 36 minutes ago
It's up now!
reply