Come off it. I was born in the 60's. I know from talking to my schoolfriends' parents in the 70s that cigarettes were known to cause cancer. It was common knowledge by then. There was apparently a groundbreaking documentary that went out at some point in the 60's and changed views from the WW2/postwar attitude that everyone smoked. By the time I went to secondary school in the 70's/80's it was common knowledge that smoking killed you, in spite of the fact that the tobacco industry was still protesting that "there was no proof that smoking caused cancer", something we all knew to be bollocks. We even called them "cancer sticks" as we had illicit puffs of them down the canal at lunchtime. So I don't accept for a minute that it "barely took off until the 90's" because by then I was an adult and I could not ever remember a time in my life when it wasn't absolutely common knowledge that smoking killed most of its participants.
Want to know when people first started suspecting tobacco was bad news? When the engineer Brunel, IKB, died, the pathologist discovered his lungs filled with black slime and opined that this was the result of "excessive cigar smoking". This was in 1859.