A History of Cigarette Sales and Lung Cancer Deaths in the US

I used data from the WHO Mortality Database and the International Mortality And Smoking Statistics to create this annotated chart showing important events in the history of smoking in US.

It took some time to research the whole timeline, and it was shocking to see some of this data. The average adult was smoking more than 10 cigarettes per day in 1960!

The annotations are interactive, so if you hover them you'll see more context about the events.

I also built the tool to make this visualization: https://www.contextualize.ai