Chocolate cigarettes

Chocolate cigarettes and their sugar cousins are sweets made to look like cigarettes: thin sticks of chalky sugar, bubblegum or chocolate, wrapped in paper and packed in boxes branded like real cigarette packets. They date from the late 19th century. Some even hide powdered sugar in the wrapper, so blowing through one produces a puff of sugar that looks like smoke.

The controversy

Candy cigarettes have long been controversial, because research has shown that they prime children to take up smoking real cigarettes.

• 1964. The US Surgeon General's landmark report on smoking and health, published on 11 January 1964, criticised candy cigarettes for trying to lure youngsters into the smoking habit, and tobacco companies began to distance themselves from them.
• 1990. A study found that sixth graders, children of about eleven or twelve, who ate candy cigarettes were twice as likely to smoke real cigarettes as those who did not.
• 2007. A survey of 25,887 adults found that 88 per cent of current and former smokers remembered eating candy cigarettes, against 78 per cent of people who had never smoked, a difference the authors said pointed to a link.

Bans and new names

Because of these concerns, the selling of candy cigarettes has been banned in several countries, though they are still made and eaten in many others. Many makers now describe their products as candy sticks, bubble gum or simply candy. In the United States, Popeye Cigarettes, sold with red tips to look lit, were renamed candy sticks and made without the red tips.

A 2010 report that a new US tobacco law had banned candy cigarettes was wrong: the law banned flavourings other than menthol in real cigarettes, not sweets that look like them: see sweets that were banned

In our pick and mix

We do not sell chocolate or candy cigarettes. For other old style sweets, see what are retro sweets?

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