The earliest forms of cigarettes were similar to their predecessor, the cigar. Cigarettes appear to have had antecedents in Central America around the 9th century in the form of reeds and smoking tubes. The Maya, and later the Aztecs, smoked tobacco and various psychoactive drugs in religious rituals and frequently depicted priests and deities smoking on pottery and temple engravings. The cigarette and the cigar were the most common methods of smoking in the Caribbean, Mexico and Central and South America until recent times.
By 1830, the cigarette had crossed into France, where it received the name cigarette; and in 1845, the French state tobacco monopoly began manufacturing them.
Production climbed markedly when a cigarette-making machine was developed in the 1880s by James Albert Bonsack which vastly increased the productivity of cigarette companies, who went from making approximately 40,000 hand-rolled cigarettes daily to around 4 million.
In the English-speaking world, the use of tobacco in cigarette form became increasingly widespread when British soldiers began emulating their comrades and Russian enemies, who had begun rolling and smoking tobacco in strips of old newspaper for lack of proper cigar-rolling leaf. This was helped by the development of tobaccos suitable for cigarette use, and by the development of the Egyptian cigarette company.
Cigarettes may have been initially used in a manner similar to pipes and cigars and not inhaled; for evidence, see the Lucky Strike ad campaign asking consumers "Do You Inhale?" from the 30s. As cigarette tobacco became milder and more acidic inhaling may have become perceived as more agreeable. On the other hand, it was seen in the 1830s that Ottomans inhaled the turkish tobacco and other pipes. As early as 1888, cigarettes were described colloquially as "coffin nails.
The widespread smoking of cigarettes in the Western world is largely a 20th-century phenomenon – at the start of the 20th century the per capita annual consumption in the USA was 54 cigarettes and consumption there peaked at 4,259 per capita in 1965. At that time about 50% of men and 33% of women smoked.By 2000, consumption had fallen to 2,092 per capita, corresponding to about 30% of men and 22% of women smoking more than 100 cigarettes per year, and by 2006 per capita consumption had declined to 1,691; implying that about 21% of the population smoked 100 cigarettes or more per year.
German doctors were the first to identify the link between smoking and lung cancer which led to the first anti-tobacco movement in Nazi Germany.During World War I and World War II, cigarettes were rationed to soldiers. During the Vietnam War, cigarettes were included with C-ration meals. In 1975 the U.S. government stopped putting cigarettes in military rations. During the second half of the 20th century, the adverse health effects of tobacco smoking started to become widely known and text-only health warnings became commonplace on cigarette packets. Warnings became prevalent but unpopular, mainly due to the political influences held by tobacco growers. The United States has not yet implemented graphical cigarette warning labels, which are considered a more effective method to communicate to the public the dangers of cigarette smoking.Canada, Mexico, Belgium, Sweden, Thailand, Malaysia, India, Pakistan, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Greece, the Netherlands,New Zealand, Norway, Hungary, the United Kingdom, France, Romania,Singapore and Turkey however, have both textual warnings and graphic visual images displaying, among other things, the damaging effects tobacco use has on the human body.
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