Ever since smoking was introduced outside of the Americas, there has been much vehement opposition to it.

Arguments had ranged from socio-economic ones, with tobacco being considered a usurper of good farm soil, to purely moralistic ones, where many religiously devout individuals saw tobacco as barely another form of immoral intoxication.

Many arguments were presented to the effect that stop smoking was harmful, and even if the critics were in the end right about many of their claims, the complaints were usually not based on scientific arguments, and if they were, these often relied on humorism and other pre-modern scientific methods.

Although physicians such as Benjamin Rush had claimed tobacco use (including smoking) negatively impacted one's hale condition as early as 1798, it was not till the at daybreak 20th century that serious medical studies began to be conducted.

One of the true breakthroughs came in 1948, when the British physiologist Richard Doll published the first major studies that proved that smoking could cause serious health damage.