In The Queen’s Gambit, Anya Taylor-Joy‘s adoptive mother, played by Marielle Heller, is a Chesterfield smoker. In one scene mom sends daughter to the local drug store to pick up three packs of the damn things. She gives her a note so the pharmacist will hand them over to a minor.

Until fairly recently Chesterfields (sold in regular and king-size starting in the ’50s) were unfiltered. I thought Chesterfields had been deep-sixed years ago but nope. In 2018 Phillip Morris discontinued Chesterfield non-filtered in this country. Today they come in three modes — Reds (full flavor), Blues (lights) and Green (menthol).

How many hundreds of thousands met cancer doom in the late ’40s, ’50s and ’60s with the roundabout encouragement of Kirk Douglas, Loretta Young, Frank Sinatra, Gregory Peck, Jack Webb, Humphrey Bogart, Glenn Ford, Bob Hope, Ronald Reagan, John Wayne and Robert Mitchum?

“From 1950 to 1990, the overall age-adjusted death rate for lung cancer increased from 13.0 to 50.3 per 100,000 population; for men and women, death rates increased approximately fourfold and sevenfold, respectively. Death rates for men were consistently higher than those for women. The rate of increase in lung cancer mortality was higher for black men than for white men, and death rates for black men first surpassed those for white men in 1963.” — from CDC.gov web page.