176 - The 'pernicious habit': the enduring popularity of nicotine in everyday life
What this challenge is about
This challenge will seek to utilise insights from nineteenth- and twentieth-century British history, highlighting the continuities and legacies of smoking for people living today; particularly the use of nicotine (in tobacco) as a lay or ‘common-sense’ treatment for stress and anxiety, including among working people and during notable ‘total’ conflicts such as the First World War.
This historical perspective will also help in exploring the appeal of smoking, and e-cigarette use or ‘vaping’, beyond the psychophysiological pull of nicotine. This is because vaping, much like smoking before it, is a cultural phenomenon and social practice, as well as a means for the delivery of an addictive substance. As such, the growing popularity of vaping, especially among young people, also has intangible elements that can be explained effectively through a historical lens.
As government seeks to legislate against the take-up of vaping by new generations, it is worth thinking about historical parallels between vaping and tobacco use, particularly the history of lay medical ideas (associating nicotine use with stress relief; a connection that research suggests is still made by vape users) and the history of public health debates related to nicotine-containing products.
Tobacco has had a longstanding presence in British culture and society, with a cultural cachet that developed over time and remained in place even in the face of scientific and medical knowledge about its harms. It remains to be seen if vaping will inherit the space once occupied by the mass phenomenon of the cigarette. Is what some doctors called the ‘pernicious habit’ in the Victorian and Edwardian periods still just as pernicious, and how might we explain this more fully?
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UN Sustainable Development Goals
