Tennessee women who lit up Virginia Slims and other cigarette brands in the 1960s and 1970s as acts of liberation are dying of lung cancer more often than women of earlier generations.
A new study shows a spike in lung cancer deaths among Tennessee women who started the habit when it became more socially acceptable to smoke and tobacco companies targeted them in marketing campaigns.
However, the same study shows women were able to largely avoid this death cycle in California and other states that imposed strict anti-smoking policies and higher tobacco taxes.
Women in those states quit smoking earlier and lit up less often than Southern women, according to the study, which was recently published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. It used white women born in 1933 as a baseline. The Tennessee death rate increased by more than 50 percent over that baseline for women born in the 1950s and 1960s.
