Smoking go way back before we were even a country and the US Military is not the nexus of it...
Silliness
Bingo. As someone who is doing some serious research of the American Indian Wars right now, I can guarantee that smoking wasn’t started by the “military industrial complex” during WWI.
Silliness"
No, it isn't. Coca-Cola's founder, Robert Woodruff, wanted "to see that every man in uniform gets a bottle of Coca-Cola for five cents, wherever he is, and whatever it costs the company."
He might have done this out of patriotism but the end result was that the USA became a nation of Coke drinkers. Because he got them habituated to using his product.
Most American GIs in WWI had never smoked a factory-rolled cigarette before the war. But the cigarette companies saw to it that they were plentiful. And nobody smoked 40 cigs a day before they could buy them machine-rolled.
In the late 19th Century only 1% of cancers found during autopsies were of the lung. By the Roaring 20s (by which time factory-rolled cigs were commonplace) that number was 14%.
In WWII Cigarette manufacturers sent free cigarettes to GIs overseas and ran adverts in the US encouraging civilians to do the same. And the companies who sent the most 'free' cigs to the GIs had the biggest increases in sales after the war. It was great advertising and great ROI.
The world has been smoking tobacco since Sir Walter Raleigh carried it to England but between 1852 and 1952, the per capita occurrence of lung cancer went from 0.3% to 5.66% of the overall population, a 19-fold increase, which brackets the invention of the cigarette rolling machine (ca. 1880) and both World Wars.
Smoking go way back before we were even a country and the US Military is not the nexus of it...
Silliness
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Exactly.
Making up crap and talking out the side of their necks. The military provided tobacco (not just cigarettes but chewing tobacco too) *because* men smoked already and it was not possible to just pop off to the corner store to pick up a pack when on the battlefield. And when dealing with all the other stressors, why make them have to deal with nic fits too?