Psychologically, the rejection of tobacco could consist in imagining rotting yellow teeth, cancerous black lungs, etc. But sociologically, those negative associations may be widespread on the group level for reasons not necessarily known on the individual level, reasons related not to health but to culture.

Why did American culture turn on tobacco after the Second World War? The most accurate psychological explanation won’t necessarily match up with the most accurate sociological explanation. That is, the question of what’s happening in the mind of the individual (e.g., the vivid imagination of somebody with rotting yellow teeth smoking a cigarette) is separate from the question of why those negative mental associations are widespread in the group. The “real” reason that America culture turned on tobacco—if I may for a moment think of the sociological explanation as more “real,” which is contra to what Roger Scruton argued in his book The Soul of the World (2014)—is that tobacco’s effect on the mind is more compatible with rightism than leftism. Tobacco is the drug of the right, and the left has increasingly taken control of American culture since the Second World War.