Cigarettes not invented

What if cigarettes were never invented? What effects does this have on the growth of big tobacco, public health, teen culture, the war on drugs, prevalence of other forms of tobacco, etc.?
 
But why wouldn't they be invented? At their most basic they are tobacco rolled in paper. That seems like it'd be hard to prevent people from doing.
 
But why wouldn't they be invented? At their most basic they are tobacco rolled in paper. That seems like it'd be hard to prevent people from doing.

Why invention of tobacco would be unavoidable? It might needs early POD but non-existence is still possible. Perhaps Americas not ever be populated or natives never begin use these.
 
Why invention of tobacco would be unavoidable? It might needs early POD but non-existence is still possible. Perhaps Americas not ever be populated or natives never begin use these.
The OP presumes the existence of tobacco. Besides, such a far back PoD would likely result in an unrecognizable world, given that people first started smoking at least several thousand years ago. Might as well prevent the invention of paper if you want to go that far back.
 
The rather simple answer is that (filter) cigarillos would take their place, many people I know smoke them instead of cigarettes even in OTL because they are taxed significantly less than cigarettes and thus are far cheaper (less than half the price of cigarettes).

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Well, I'm not sure about not being invented as they are basically cheap cigars. However, for the sake of argument, it may be better to hypothesize some sort of pest which wipes out tobacco sometime from 1500 to 1800 and kept the practice from ever being in fashion. Maybe, without tobacco, some other (perhaps healthier) alternative becomes common.

Without tobacco, the American south will not be as heavily populated form 1600 to 1800 as that was the primary export crop. Britain might move more people into the less malaria/yellow fever ridden northern colonies. Slavery would likely never be as common and might even be extinguished in America before the advent of the cotton gin. Probably not though, it would just be less common.

This land may even remain French and Spanish, quietly ignored by everyone.
 
Simple: have some other drug that needs a pipe instead take over as the preferred combustion drug of choice. No need for cigarettes.
 

B-29_Bomber

Banned
Well, I'm not sure about not being invented as they are basically cheap cigars. However, for the sake of argument, it may be better to hypothesize some sort of pest which wipes out tobacco sometime from 1500 to 1800 and kept the practice from ever being in fashion. Maybe, without tobacco, some other (perhaps healthier) alternative becomes common.

Without tobacco, the American south will not be as heavily populated form 1600 to 1800 as that was the primary export crop. Britain might move more people into the less malaria/yellow fever ridden northern colonies. Slavery would likely never be as common and might even be extinguished in America before the advent of the cotton gin. Probably not though, it would just be less common.

This land may even remain French and Spanish, quietly ignored by everyone.

More like something else replaces Tobacco. Like rice or indigo.
 

B-29_Bomber

Banned
I don't know for sure but I thought not all the land of the south was well suited for those crops. They were mainly South Carolina, were they not?

Those were just examples. But something would likely replace Tobacco.

England's first efforts at colonizing were in the American south. Those first colonies would try something to become viable. King James, who hated tobacco, I think tried to encourage silk worms.
 
Cigarettes made up about 5% of the market until the 1910s. Even less before the invention of the cigarette machine in the 1880s. You'll need a colossal nerf on tobacco itself--a novel disease or whatever--to prevent the settlement of the South. The majority of the market was pipe tobacco, chewing tobacco, and cigars. It still is in parts of the South, such as that much of Tennessee/Kentucky's tobacco is not used for cigarettes compared to, say North Carolina's tobacco.

But I don't know if you can prevent cigarettes from being invented. It's just paper and tobacco, very simple in construction. You'd need to kill tobacco itself. From what I've read, there seems to be plenty of ways of suppressing the cigarette industry, keeping it to maybe 15-20% of the tobacco market and thus not making it ubiquitous as it became OTL. The best way of getting rid of cigarettes might be the Prohibitionist movement, which targetted cigarettes as well as alcohol, and after alcohol was banned, some of them triumphantly proclaimed "cigarettes are next!" Over a dozen states banned cigarettes in the late 1910s/early 1920s, and many others restricted their sale. But the movement was basically spent the moment it began. General Pershing proclaimed that cigarettes were needed for the American Army in WWI, and it could not have helped the cause of the anti-tobacco movement that some of the same people who wanted cigarettes banned were later on in France passing out cigarettes to American soldiers. Which of course, happened to get a ton of people hooked and thus expanded the market and made the companies even stronger.

But if cigarettes are that small of the market, everything is affected. Starting with no ashtrays in cars--a common feature from the late 20s onward. Also including advertising--the tobacco industry was at the cutting edge of advertising. Granted, the same advertising geniuses who helped build Big Tobacco worked for many industries, but they'll be either losing a huge client or somehow failing with that client. That's hard to imagine, since what these advertising executives were doing was basic psychology which is pretty guaranteed to work on a vulnerable population. The cigarette industry basically created a market for tobacco. The guy who created the "Tobacco Trust", J.B. Duke (who also basically made the cigarette industry as it was and as it is even now), found it hard to imagine that cigarettes would ever be much bigger than they were in the late 1910s, and he was utterly, utterly wrong. You'd be proving him right.

Nerfing cigarettes is strengthening the early anti-tobacco movement (which targetted not just cigarettes, since they were such a small part of the market), nerfing the strength of advertisement firms in the 20th century, and keeping public perception anti-tobacco. The anti-tobacco movement failed in part because they felt too "Victorian" in morality and not "modern". And the sad part is, Big Tobacco was able to capture the feminist movement and portray women smoking as a symbol of liberation (which they still were doing into the 1970s with female-targetted cigarettes). How can you beat that? Probably by finding a way to keep men smoking, unless you also want to kill the early feminist movement which gained a lot of strength based on women's suffrage. Now, one of the main reasons a lot of people didn't smoke was because of the effects on health. If you were into athletics and such, many people realised that smoking was no good for you even after a few cigarettes. That might be a way to keep the Army from demanding cigarettes. I couldn't imagine what other drug you might want to hand out. I'd hope more caffeine, but amphetamines are a prospective as well.

Overall, you'd get a healthier public, but also more prevelance of other forms of tobacco. Now, I mainly focused on the American tobacco market, but I can't imagine without a strong American market, that tobacco would take off as much globally. You'll see a lot of people worldwide surviving a few years (at least) longer, and public spending on health being spent elsewhere. Asia especially--cigarette use is huge in China and Japan, and with the nerf to the tobacco industry, they might not be able to hook nearly as many people. For China especially, that could have huge repercussions. But there's still the issue of other forms of tobacco, but I think a lot of that is fairly limited in terms of success, thus capping the strength of Big Tobacco. E-cigs might be invented earlier, though, since a concern over cancer links (which will be found by the 50s/60s) and a desire to create a new market might help them become prominent far earlier. Maybe as a sort of "space age" way to get your hit of nicotine, in a way that unlike tobacco, is "completely safe", which with science as it was in the 50s/60s, Big Tobacco will actually be able to say and promote as such.

Those were just examples. But something would likely replace Tobacco.

England's first efforts at colonizing were in the American south. Those first colonies would try something to become viable. King James, who hated tobacco, I think tried to encourage silk worms.

King James didn't have much influence on tobacco's popularity in either England or elsewhere.

But for crops, the South is pretty limited. Various grains grow best, but that's not exactly a cash crop. Yaupon (Ilex vomitoria) could be popularised, though. Lots of people claim the association of yaupon tea with black drink, the American Indian ritual drink that caused vomiting, prevented the popularity, but yaupon was still extensively consumed by whites throughout the colonial period and into the early 20th century regardless. Maybe it could find the right audience in Europe and take off like coffee or tea did.

Other than that, rice, indigo, etc. are the best options pre-cotton gin, and they can't grow everywhere. So the end result is much more small-scale yeoman farmers in North Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, etc. That's a huge effect on slavery. Also, yaupon is not domesticated, and judging by its relative yerba mate, domestication could take centuries, so plantation-style agriculture cannot work for yaupon. Other potentials are tea and coffee, which OTL were small-scale in the South. As far as I know, all these crops can only grow in the Deep South, since the Upper South has too cold of winters/shorter growing seasons than the coastal/Deep South.
 
Cigarettes were the cheapest way to smoke, and also the most portable. You don't need a pipe (bulky and a little inconvenient), and cigars were pricey. Some paper, even left over newspaper, some tobacco (even home grown think Russian Mahorka) and voila. The big thing was the invention of the cigarette rolling machines that could turn out tons of pre-rolled cigarettes inexpensively, eliminating the need to roll your own. Pre-rolled cigarettes made smoking easier and also made it more accessible to women who had historically not been attracted to cigars or pipes in large numbers.

Having said all that, you can only put off the cigarette rolling machine for so long, the market is there and so is the technology. The only way to avoid cigarettes is to prevent the existence of tobacco.
 
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