[GreenStreak]

When the US Surgeon General announced that cigarette smoking may be harmful to health in the early 1960s people were shocked, it had NEVER occurred to most people that it might be dangerous (in the 1950s OVER 50% of American adults smoked and I imagine the number was about the same for the British and certainly for the French).

I remember as a kid hanging out at the gas station in the '50s, guys would come in and ask for a pack of 'coffin nails'. The dangers were not unknown.

[Madame Dufarge]

Yes, my grandfather (who smoked) also called them coffin nails.

Of course, back then people were laboring under the misapprehension that their life was their own, not the state's.