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MEMORIES:
retrophile remembers...Five years old and I had a horrible addiction. Candy cigarettes, yeah I was hooked. I looked so cool with ... More »
Posted on 02/14/09
Nothing exuded cool like hanging out behind the convenience store with your buddies and having a candy cigarette dangling from your lips. Like a miniature James Dean or Bette Davis, you could either look tough or glamorous. Of course, that was before the public fully understood the dangers involved with smoking the actual thing. Over the years, candy cigarettes simply lost their… cool.
Candy cigarettes could be found in various forms. Some were made of chocolate and others of bubblegum (which, you may fondly recall, let out a puff of powdery “smoke” when a small breath went through.) For the aficionado, there were even bubble gum cigars with exotic names like “El Bubble” which were available in fruit, banana or mint flavors. The ones most often recalled, however, are the classic, chalky, bland sticks of candy with a red “ember” painted on the end. Early on in the candy-cigarette era, packages could be found bearing the actual names and resemblances of real cigarette packages. Eventually these gave way to look-alike names, such as “Camales,” “Stark Stryke” and “Winstun” along with their look-alike packaging.
Candy cigarettes are hard to come by today and can only be occasionally found in outlets specializing in retro-candies. In fact, many have come to believe that they’ve been outlawed in the United States. As the public became more educated about the effects of smoking through the mid-to-late 1960s, outcries to ban the likely “gateway candy” from the candy aisle started taking place, though it was never passed into federal law.
Rather, time took its course, and as public distaste for cigarettes grew, so did their disdain for the candy variety. Candy cigarettes began to disappear from shelves and today remain but a memory to those who ever bought a pack and rolled them up in the sleeve of their tee shirt or dangled one from their lips, anxious to prove to the world that adults weren’t the only ones that could look cool.
