“In the 1970s, when Joanne Iuliucci of Staten Island, N.Y., started smoking at age 12, she says she had no idea that smoking was dangerous, even though surgeon general’s bombshell report had come out six years earlier.

“Absolutely not! Why would I?” says Iuliucci. “Because everybody was smoking. Mother and Father were smoking. Doctors were smoking. You were able to smoke in the movie theater, food shopping with Mom. Really, back then nobody knew what we know today.”

In large part that’s because the tobacco industry maintained for years that experts still disagreed about the evidence, Brandt says.

“Their campaign – their invented controversy – was actually enormously successful,” Brandt says. “If you asked people on the street, ‘Do we know whether smoking causes lung cancer or not?’ many would say, ‘Well, you know, there’s a very significant controversy about that.’ “

But in fact, by 1964 there was very little controversy among scientists outside the tobacco industry. In the 1950s, highly regarded studies had already made the link between smoking and lung cancer. By the early 1960s, there was mounting concern among public health officials and cancer and heart disease specialists.”