In 1990 the Soviet Union Collapsed and You Could Smoke on an Airplane

In 1990 the Soviet Union collapsed and you could still smoke on an airline flight from New York to Seattle.

Likewise, thirty years ago the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was considered a respected agency, the staff the best and the brightest.

Today, in 2025 the CDC is considered a controversial agency, with their programs, data sets, and advisements routinely scorned by those both on the left and on the right.

The science the CDC does is quite extensive, their research covering everything from obscure topics like the tropical illness amebiasis, to mammograms, earthquakes, and underage drinking.

Do you need some data on heroin use amongst homeless ? The CDC has it!

Overall, the CDC casts a wide net, with the stated goal of the organization quite broad in that is works to “protect public health by providing leadership, information, and scientific expertise in preventing and controlling diseases,” and “promote health and quality of life, by supporting and undertaking efforts that aim to prevent and control injury, disability, and environmental health threats.”

Lofty goals.

These days the experts are suspect and untrustworthy. No one need to listen to them! What can a team of over educated eggheads know about anything?

One piece of data that the CDC has been collecting for quite a while concerns tobacco use, which in the days before the vape pen was data on cigars, cigarettes, chewing tobacco and snuff.

In the last third of the 20th century (1970–2000) overall tobacco use precipitously declined. Simply put, extensive education and some aggressively persuasive doctors and nurses compelled millions of people to quit smoking.

Public health slowly improved via education and due diligence.

This is an instructive story

Education and outreach worked.

In 1965 roughly 42% of adults smoked in the United States, with this number falling to roughly 23 % in 2001. Only 11% of Americans smoked in 2021, with this so called “Tobacco Nation” mostly living in the American south as well as the American Rust Belt.

From Detroit to Tulsa to Tallahassee and on to Winston-Salem, smoking rates remain stubbornly high.

You know these places.

Here, in Red State America, gun violence as well as domestic abuse festers. In this land country music reigns and voters skew rural and conservative. Since the 1970’s their once prosperous factories have emptied and their futures have dimmed. Many here voted for Trump in 2016 and 2024.

Many smoke.

Perhaps you live in here in Tobacco Nation: Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and West Virginia.

Remember, smoking kills.

Still, cigarette use continues to wane, with smoking now about as common as being left hand dominant.

Not so long-ago smoking was huge in America, and then, it ended, slowly, with anti-tobacco education eventually swaying enough people to quit.

A watershed moment in this massive shift occurred 30 years ago when smoking was finally prohibited in aviation, and in February of 1990 smoking was banned in all domestic flights.

If you’d flown in an aircraft in the United States before 1990 you were allowed to smoke inside the plane.

That sounds fucked up but it’s true.

And yes, this does seem crazy to most anyone alive today.

Remember, 1990 was the same the year when the Soviet Union imploded and collapsed.

On the crazy continues, as nearly everyone today knows that smoking, over the long term and even in the short term, is detrimental to deadly.

The CDC will continue to collect data on tobacco use. They will continue to do good work concerning public health.

It remains unknown that those in Tobacco Nation will listen to what the CDC is saying.