I was 15 when I started smoking, and so were most of my friends. We smoked to rebel against our parents but also to identify with them — of course they smoked, even as they told us not to. We smoked because it was feminine and sexy, and also masculine and tough. Because celebrities did it, and they looked cool. Because the prissy kids didn’t do it, and we weren’t them. Because cigarettes were both forbidden and easy to get: ten quarters in a cigarette vending machine, which you could still find in most pizza joints and doughnut shops in suburban New Jersey in the early 1990s.

All of that — the appeal, the access, the illicitness of cigarettes — was by design. By the time my friends and I were born, cigarette makers had stitched their products into the fabric of our culture so thoroughly that not even a century’s worth of research tying those products to an array of slow, painful deaths was enough to deter many of us.

Tobacco companies made cigarettes a diet tool and a matter of high fashion. They made smoking a feminist act. They didn’t just assure the public that it was safe to smoke; they used doctors to push their brands. And the more they came to understand their own product, the more they advertised cigarettes to the young. Most people who don’t start smoking by the end of adolescence never will. The cigarette makers knew that. They used cartoon camels, pictures of Santa Claus and larger-than-life cowboys in their ads.