Who smokes, and why do they do it? What factors discourage and otherwise reward or incentivize smoking? Tobacco use has been accompanied by controversy from the moment of its entry into European culture, and conflicting opinions regarding its potentially adverse influence on health have coexisted for hundreds of years. Its use in all forms represents the world’s single greatest cause of preventable disease and death. Tobacco was introduced to Europe by Christopher Columbus, who in October 1492 discovered the crop in Cuba. While the next four centuries would see tobacco as the most highly traded economic commodity, by 1900, the now familiar cigarette remained obscure and accounted for only 2% of total tobacco sales. Global tobacco consumption rose sharply after 1914 and became especially prevalent following World War II, particularly among men. Indeed, overall tobacco sales increased by more than 60% by the mid-20th century, and cigarettes were a critical driver of this growth. Cigarettes dominated the tobacco market by 1950, by then accounting for more than 80% of all tobacco purchases. In the absence of clinical and scientific evidence against tobacco, moral and religious arguments dominated opposition voices against tobacco consumption in the 1800s. However, by the mid-20th century, advancements in medical research supported enhanced government and voluntary actions against tobacco advertising and also raised awareness of the dangers associated with passive tobacco smoke exposure. Solid epidemiological work connecting tobacco use with “the shortening of life span” began to appear in the medical literature in the 1950s, linking smoking with lung cancer and related conditions. In subsequent years, these developments led to significant curtailment of tobacco use. This monograph explores aspects of the intersection of tobacco with themes of behavioral incentives, religion, culture, literature, economics, and government over the past five centuries.

Twitter, a popular social media outlet, has become a useful tool for the study of social behavior through user interactions called tweets. The location time, and message content of tweets provide invaluable social and demographic information for an applied comparison of social behaviors across the world. Our goal is to determine the density and sentiment surrounding tobacco and e-cigarette tweets and link prevalence of word choices to tobacco and e-cigarette use at various localities. All tweets with geo-spatial coordinates are salvaged from the twitter-feed, representing approximately 1% of the entire twitter-sphere. Pattern matching by tobacco and e-cigarette related keywords yield approximately 20,000 affiliated tweets per month from North America. The emotionally charged words that contribute to the positivity of various subsets of regional tweets are quantitatively measured using hedonometrics. We examined the density of these behavioral tweet indicators by region and tested the relationship between tweeted smoking sentiments and time-space-type coordinates over a 4-month span. For states with ≥600 tobacco related tweets (N=30), we find a strong positive correlation (Pearson’s r=0.54, p<0.01) between the relative tweet density per state and the average positivity of tobacco related tweets. However, state-to-state sentiment comparisons suggest the attitude toward tobacco use can vary. We also explore the relationship between the ratio of tobacco tweets per state-to-state smoking rate estimates. Our results illustrate significant variation in smoking sentiments by state and at varying regional scopes. It is anticipated that real-time analysis of nicotine and tobacco products using tweets will allow for more targeted forms of health policy planning and intervention. Regional density of nicotine and tobacco use related tweets yield insight to the prevalence of tobacco usage per capita. Sentiment analysis across the twitter-sphere can help illuminate hazardous health behavioral trends, which may lead to better targeting of health behavior interventions.