The New Yorker article claims that “before cigarette rolling machines, lung cancer was a rare disease.”

Silk Road - The Second Act

 · 

Follow

Have read 10,000+ books. 7h

The New Yorker article claims that “before cigarette rolling machines, lung cancer was a rare disease.” How did people get their tobacco fix in the 1800s and earlier that was so much healthier?

--People weren't necessarily "healthier,"--they just faced different risks--Before machines, tobacco--hit the body in other ways.

--Men smoked pipes, they puffed cigars, chewed tobacco and rubbed snuff--methods that kept the smoke mostly in the mouth.

The machine-made cigarette changed everything. Came in the 1880s, made tobacco cheap, made smoking easy.

Most important, it let people inhale deep.

Pipe smokers rarely pulled smoke to their lungs--Cigarette smokers always did, smoke went deeper, went there more often--It carried more tar, more poison.

The old tobacco users died too, they got cancers of the mouth, the throat--the stomach from swallowing tobacco juice.

But their lungs often stayed clean, the machine didn't just roll cigarettes. It rolled out that new kind of dying--