The Disappearance of the Ashtray | Hacker News Reader

The Disappearance of the Ashtray

clivethompson.medium.com

215 pointsmooreds636 comments

It's tough to portray just how ubiquitous smoking was to a modern audience. You would go to a restaurant and the first thing your hostess would ask is "smoking or non"? I remember standing in a checkout line in the 80s as a child and being fascinated with the billowing clouds of smoke an old lady blew. I remember coming home from bars reeking of smoke, even though I didn't. Even teachers had their own lounges that reeked of smoke (nowadays in some states you could be fined for possessing Tobacco products on school grounds!).

I often think about how much younger today's generation looks and I can't help but think it's due to the huge reduction in the amount of people who smoke. The people I grew up with who still smoke look 5-10 years older than their peers.

Do you remember professors smoking in class or office hours? The student smoking area in high school?

There was a smocking area for students in my high school. Never seen anyone smocking in classrooms though.

I was a little late to the game, but in the mid-80s my parents took us to a screening of 2001 a Space Odyssey at the local university, and although they weren't in use by then, all of the desks in the lecture hall had ashtrays build into their armrests.

At one time, a pipe was nearly as stereotypical of professors as a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows.

There is a youtube video of renowned physicist Sidney Coleman (RIP giving a classroom lecture about general relativity or something. I was watching it, listening along, and at one point in the lecture he stopped to light a smoke, then kepc lecturing with the cig in his hand. I almost busted up laughing.

Oppenheimer also would lecture while holding a cigaratte, according to biographies of him that I've read, but he was before my time and I've never seen any videos of him.

I do remember going to Palo Alto Medical Foundation in the mid 1970s, and waiting in the exam room until the doctor walked in, puffing on a cigarette.

More Doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette

https://www.history.com/.image/t_share/MTU4NDI2ODU5NTc3NTUwM...

We called it "the smoke hole".

By the mid-80s, kids generally couldn’t smoke in school in the US. Each school district or town or state had their own rules, though. I was told by kids a few years older than me that my high school allowed seniors to smoke in the early 80s. The 70s I think there were even fewer restrictions on the kids, but there were designated areas. You didn’t smoke in class.

But it changed mid-80s for students. There’s a famous 1989 song called “Smoking in the Boys Room” by Motley Crue, referencing kids going to the bathroom to smoke and then quickly leaving before getting caught.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5oVBvxA0mm0

Smokin' in the boys room

Teacher don't you fill me up with your rule

'Cause everybody knows that smokin' ain't allowed in school

Checkin' out the hall, makin' sure the coast is clear

Lookin' in the stalls, nah, there ain't nobody here

It's way older than that. "Smokin' in the Boys Room" is originally by Brownsville Station, 1973.

Random ashtray history: the massive SAGE computer system (1958), built for air defense, had ashtrays and cigarette lighters physically built into the computer consoles.

Brownsville Station was singing that song in the early 70s:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smokin%27_in_the_Boys_Room

It obviously varied by area of the country, or perhaps school district. There was no smoking at our schools in the 70s.

> You would go to a restaurant and the first thing your hostess would ask is "smoking or non"?

I remember being asked this the first time I visited the US in the early 1990. To me, this was downright progressive: In Switzerland, at the time, you did NOT have the choice of a non-smoking section available.

I moved to Switzerland recently and I was very unpleasantly surprised at the general attitude towards smoking here.

It’s routine to see someone hold an infant or child in one hand and a smoke in the other.

It’s technically forbidden to smoke in train stations but there is no enforcement and people will smoke everywhere anyway. Same thing for underground parkings. The “rule” seems to be that if you can somehow see the outside and it’s not separated by a door/window, then you’re “outside” and can smoke…

Terrasses in bars and restaurants are basically a giant smoke cloud as the smoke gets trapped under the umbrellas/awnings for everyone (children included) to enjoy.

Smoking right in front of entrances and windows is a national sport.

Advertisement for tobacco and vapes is allowed and ubiquitous.

So many people are smokers in CH (all ages), it’s impossible to go out without coming back reeking of cold smoke.

You can’t really enjoy a balcony or open window because everyone else around smokes and it’ll get into your living quarters.

This was such a major disappointment. I imagined Switzerland having clean air and low pollution… well, far from it. I don’t smoke and I’ve never smoked as much through other peoples second hand smoke as here. Ditto car exhaust.

The train station smoking ban is only a few years old, it used to be a lot worse, you get off the train and many people would be smoking (either their last cigarette before the ride, or their first after getting off). Nowadays it's just a few people who ignore the rules, without consequences.

Yeah, that was one of the things that struck me as so weird coming from the Netherlands when I was on holiday in Switzerland. While the Netherlands was already on track to ban smoking on the actual train platforms as well at that time, arriving at the central station of Zurich was really something else. Smokers everywhere, in a country that was so orderly in most other respects.

> Nowadays it's just a few people who ignore the rules, without consequences.

For now. In a while the last holdouts will be confronted by people around them and staff alike as the public opinion shifts. People who are strongly affected by cigarette smoke (asthmatics, COPD sufferers) will slowly come to expect that those areas are really smoke free too, and are places they can actually go without having to take medication directly after. The affront of someone smoking where they shouldn't is gradually felt more acutely.

Most COPD sufferers are heavy smokers themselves :) This is how they got COPD in fact. In the Netherlands it's pretty standard in pensioner's housing.

Terraces in bars are now just smoking areas in countries that implemented an indoor smoking ban.

Some places try implement an X meters from entrances rule, but its a waste of time.

Depends where. It’s illegal to smoke on terraces, near entrances, and near windows in Canada.

I believe NYC has similar bylaws.

But yes in many places, outdoor and terraces/patios are still a health hazard.

Terraces and patios here are clearly designated as the smoking area.

Bars without a smoking area simply don't survive - nobody goes to them.

Still doesn’t make it right.

As a rational individual (or as my couple of friends with a new born), if I want to avoid exposing myself or infants to known carcinogens, I have to never ever eat on a patio/terrace because it’s been co-opted for smoking, but also not indoors because the smoke generally gets in through the windows and entrances (as the waiters move a lot of air by going to and from the kitchen hundreds of time a service)

That is your problem.

If the terrace is clearly marked as a smoking area, complaining about people smoking in the smoking area is irrational behavior.

As for bringing infants to bars... Well. Restaurants is one thing, but bringing infants (or any children) to bars is just antisocial behavior.

Where I live its not permitted for minors to be in the bar after 9pm, but many people think it should be much, much earlier cutoff time.

Now what's funny is, this actually was briefly a solved problem, but anti smoking people went and ruined it for everyone in some countries.

The solution was entirely sealed off smoking rooms with ventilation that ensured smoke didn't "leak" from the smoking room.

Anti smoking campaigners made it so smoking areas had to be in the open air to some extent, entirely prohibiting indoor smoking rooms.

Hence: the patio/terrace is now the smoking area, instead of sectioning off of an area indoors and fitting of a ventilation.

Hard disagree. You’re free to do as you please as long as it doesn’t impact others.

Annexing patios and terraces for smokers use very much impacts non smokers. And it’s not like I can sidestep the problem because maybe I would also like to enjoy a meal or drink outdoors without smoking, and if I don’t I still have to walk through a toxic cloud to get into the venue. Never mind being pretty much in the smoking section if the only spot left is near the door or window.

People who smoke bother those who don’t much more than the other way around. It takes one smoker to ruin the air and make it toxic in a 15–30m radius for everyone else.

This isn’t “my” problem. Im not being facetious or picky. Posting an area as smoking doesn’t absolve anyone of the consequences or burden on others. Cigarette smoke stinks (even most smokers agree), is known to be a potent carcinogen, and no one should be forced to inhale secondhand smoke whenever a smoker feels like indulging (and harming themselves but at least it’s their prerogative and mostly their problem except for the huge societal financial burden to treat them afterwards)

Also, this might sound weird in puritanical US but there really isn’t anything sordid about bars or restaurants in Europe. Some bars are more geared towards adults but most places are a mix of families and adults, taking your children with you to these venues doesn’t make you a bad parent and happens often.

I guess the question remains: where should a venue locate its smoking area?

An enclosed, ventilated space is mostly prohibited due to the law being an ass.

> it’s their prerogative and mostly their problem except for the huge societal financial burden to treat them afterwards

In the UK at least, smokers tend to pay in more as tax on their cigarette habit than they cost the state in pensions and healthcare, thanks to dying early. They literally are the opposite of a burden.

Regarding children in bars: I'm European myself, and the social acceptability of having your child in a bar has been waning for quite some time.

How is it a waste of time? It has done wonders in Sweden.

Just because they risk the alcool license.

In the bus stops nobody cares. In general, smokers aren't the most empathetic kind of people.

So why couldn’t this be done outside Sweden? AFAIK most countries require licensing for selling alcohol which some authority overviews and can withdraw when some laws are broken (serving alcohol to minors etc). Why wouldn’t it be possible to also lose your license if you allow smoking where it’s not permitted?

> Why wouldn’t it be possible to also lose your license if you allow smoking where it’s not permitted?

This already happens to the extent that it is enforceable.

If a venue allow smoking inside where not permitted, or in an area deemed 'inside' (too sheltered, whatever), the venue gets fined or can have its licence suspended or even fully withdrawn.

The law also makes some provision for common sense.

The venues ability to control smoking ends at the boundary (the door). So the venue isn't responsible if someone smokes outside the door on the footpath - its not their problem.

Designating the outdoor areas as smoking areas is an acceptable compromise. Venues lacking in smoking areas tend to be unviable financially.

In Sweden they banned smoking on them, and the place risks their alcool license. So they are quite strict about it.

>The “rule” seems to be that if you can somehow see the outside and it’s not separated by a door/window, then you’re “outside” and can smoke… Smoking right in front of entrances and windows is a national sport

This is true in most of Europe to varying degrees. You often see people standing just inside of a doorway, with one hand technically "outside" while they are smoking. Or quickly inhaling a cigarette as a bus/train approaches, and then exhaling it on the bus/train.

Check the location of Philip Morris headquarters. Too many local salaries and careers depend on you passively inhaling the smoke... and lookup revolving door between tobacco and pharma industries.

I remember the smoking/non choice not being there in many places but for the other reason: there was no non-smiling section. That was often just in fancy places!

(UK, born in 78 so remembering no further back than the mid 80s for the most part)

Of cause I meant "non smoking" not "non smiling" above. Slide keyboard and auto-carrot strike again!

In '80s UK, a "non-smiling" section would have been totally credible. The place was grim.

Yeah, smoking was everywhere. I remember flying when you could smoke.

But the main thing is the smell of stale cigarette smoke was just like this undercurrent of any public place you went. Everyone's car. Churches. Everywhere it was that smell.

Also at least where I was in KS, store clerks didn't give a crap. We could buy smokes in middle school if we wanted. Thankfully I never did more than a brief fascination with cloves (and believe me, smoking too many cloves one night because you're upset over a girl will cure you of that).

People would smoke in church? During the service?

“Hey, if god didn’t want me to smoke he shouldn’t have invented cigarettes”

In some of the more old school churches I went to in Missouri yeah. More on the Kansas side of my family it was more everyone would smoke in the foyer / approaching steps or such, and it'd just suck through the whole building the whole day.

If a lot of worshipers smoked outside just beforehand, it would still smell of stale cigs inside.

I remember this as an old joke:

It's sinful to smoke while you're praying, but it's virtuous to pray while you're smoking.

I was a kid during that time and even though I didn't smoke I only started to smell this when I was out of contact with cigarettes smoke for a week. My senses adapted quickly back in smoking environment and I couldn't smell the stench any more.

Smoking or non?

Looks like you're about 25 years younger than me. When I was a kid, there was no such thing as a nonsmoking section. Of course you could smoke, anywhere!

Us kids didn't get real tobacco cigarettes, but we always had candy cigarettes so we could "smoke" along with the grown-ups.

https://www.google.com/search?q=candy+cigarette&tbm=isch

One difference from today was that our candy cigarettes had brand names just like the grown-up cigarettes, or a close facsimile:

https://thedieline.com/blog/2019/10/28/the-history-of-the-ca...

"Hey dad, can I bum a smoke?"

I remember the first time I took an airline flight after they introduced a non-smoking section at the back of the plane. I got seated in the front row of non-smoking, right behind the last row of smoking.

As soon as the no smoking light went off, everyone in the row ahead of me lit up!

Smoking on planes is absolutely something I can't wrap my head around in any possible way. How the hell someone EVER thought it would be a good idea to let people smoke while packed inside a flying metal cylinder?

It's hard to imagine flying passengers as being a "startup", but it really only dates from around the 60s.

Today I know of people who can't fly at all (because they can't stop smoking long enough.) even short flights of a couple hours are out of reach. (I was once on a 2 hour flight that took 6 hours for reasons, and some of the passengers fairly sprinted in the destination airport to get to a smoking area at 1am)

So banning smoking when air travel was in its infancy would have killed it.

I have heard of people using nicotine gum, patch, or lozenge for situations like this.

You can vape up your sleeve on a plane, but snus is the best way.

Snus isn't actually legal in a lot of places. As in - it's legal to have, but you can't buy it anywhere(most of EU and UK I believe).

it's quite a shame, because it's much cleaner and less dangerous than other ways of taking up nicotine.

I agree, but also know what a Swedish school looks like, with such pouches stuck in various places, ceiling etc.

My uk school had chewing gum in those places rather than nic pouches.

The nic pouches are probably a LOT easier to cleanup than chewing gum.

Pretty much only better than actually smoking, right?

You can definitely buy pouches of tobacco to be used like snus in the UK (and I'm almost certain that was the case before Brexit, too). Unless "snus" has some specific definition that's illegal and the UK sells an alternative? Not sure, last time I tried snus was in Finland over a decade ago.

Actual snus(powdered tabbaco sold and advertised as a product you put up your nose) isn't legal for sale in the UK:

https://www.buynicotinepouches.co.uk/blogs/news/buying-snus-...

How is snus different from snuff? Cursory google seems to suggest you can buy snuff in the UK, which is also powdered tobacco that you put up your nose

Uhm, frankly I'm not sure. Quick Google reveals a few differences but I'm not sure why one is banned while the other one isn't.

Snuff is probably culturally significant. Despite never knowing anyone who takes snuff you still read about snuff and snuff boxes. In fact I seem to recall that some people still call the webbing between your thumb and index finger the "snuff box" because that's where people would put the snuff before insufflating it.

I would imagine snuff boxes / accessories now days are bought more by people who snort illegal drugs than tobacco and the name remains as a PR thing (shops, even head shops with weed art in the window, don't want to advertise things like "cocaine snorter"). But I've no idea how many people still exist that use actual snuff.

Snus comes in pouches (like a teabag?), intended to be placed between your gum + inside of your lip AFAIK.

Snus is something you put between your gum and lip.

everyones talking biscuits vs cookies. I love it.

Since there’s a lot of wrong info in the responses… snus is the word for snuff in Sweden and traditionally had an extra sanitization step (boiling IIRC), which was different enough that it became it’s own term, because quality was better. Snus is almost universally used under the lip, but I think used to be used nasally too.

Snuff is just the English name, and can refer to nasal snuff, dip, pouches. Just means it’s ground up tobacco and isn’t anymore specific than that. Regionally it means whatever way of using it is most common.

Basically it’s confusing in the same way if you ask and American or European about football. Technically the word is not specific but it has very strong regional definitions

Uh, this is bit weird topic for me to "well actually", but you're not correct about where snus goes [1]. It goes between the upper lip and gum, you don't inhale it. That would be "snuff" in English.

Source: am Swedish, but not a tobacco user.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snus

You could put snus in your nose, I think some old curmudgeons did that when I was a small kid. But it's unusual. The "snuff" in English is also "snus" in Swedish. (Etymology wise, it must be the same word.)

Nasal snuff is absolutely legal to sell in UK: https://www.mcchrystals.co.uk/news/nasal-snuff

Snus refers to Swedish pouches with boiled (or somehow sanitized, can’t remember exactly) tobacco, as opposed to other kinds. Snuff can refer to stuff you put under your lip or up yer nose.

Hm. That would be 'Schnupftabak' here. Aeons ago I actually used the white powdered menthol variants in ways which could be mistaken for something else. Made for some hilarious situations :-)

I see it's still legal in .de, and according to wikipedia has no tobacco-taxes on it since 1993! The real stuff, not only that white grapesugar/menthol stuff.

In the US, the major airlines prohibit use of e-cigarettes onboard. Do not vape on a commercial airliner.

You still can get away with it fairly easy. I quit this last year but when on flights I often would go into the bathroom and just hold the vape until it was gone. Then again I wasn’t one of those that blew room filling clouds

Imagine risking a federal offense for a fuckin' vape.

> It's hard to imagine flying passengers as being a "startup", but it really only dates from around the 60s.

It’s more than 30 years older. The first commercial airline opened around the start of WW1, and most major airlines (western at least) were founded in the 20s.

The 60s is the effective start of the jet age.

I don't disagree but prior to ww2's investment into R&D, infrastructure and labor force the economics of the industry were fundamentally different. The 1950s and early 1960s were to airlines what the 1990s were for computing.

I also wonder how much WW2 forcing people into planes helped to kill some of the fear of it.

I doubt flying in planes doing WW2 decreased fear of flying

The fear you speak of doesn’t come from the flying bit. It definitely let people know the flying tech is fairly safe.

Go read about Pan Am in the 1920s and 1930s & you will think differently. They were busy building global transportation routes with whatever technology they could get their hands on.

There's a really good docudrama on Amazon, Across the Pacific, that covers the early days of Pan Am:

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B0888MFZR2/

(Using a smile link while I still can... Change it to www if it doesn't work in the future.)

Yes, commercial flight goes back before the 60s. And sure there were the flying boats and so on. But that era of commercial flight was very limited, it was expensive, there were very limited schedules and so on.

Today I can get a flight to pretty much anywhere in the world, with maybe a day's lead time, and perhaps 36 hours of travel. Anywhere. In the world.

So, I think we can say air travel is no longer in "startup" phase. It is heavily regulated and very organised. (there are still startups in aviation, but they need a hook different to flying-you-there)

In the same way computers existed before 1960,and PCs were available in the 70's,but arguably its not till Windows 95 that it goes "main stream", and its not until the iPhone/Android era that "everyone has a computing device".

So my point is that the era of commercial aviation aimed at the masses kicks off in the 60s,not that the 60s is the first instance of commercial aviation.

You're confusing "air travel" with "jet travel". Jet travel was obviously a startup in the 60s.

No, he's right. Air travel was a luxury thing and super expensive until the 60s.

Only a very small percentage of the population in rich countries would do it.

Now people from Cambodia can fly for a large amount of money for them, but still, they are able to. In the past they just wouldn't be able to afford any kind of flight. Or even worse, they just wouldn't have flights or a publicly accessible airport.

Pan American Airlines built out a huge amount of infrastructure before WW2 to fly across the Pacific to Australia. They had fueling stops at Wake Island, Guam, Midway, and of course Hawaii. And they also pioneered routes to Latin America. The power and prestige PanAm had is really remarkable.

Remember Odyssey 2001? The Orion III Space Clipper to the rotating space station had a PanAm logo on it.

There was some commercial air travel prior to the ... 1980s ... but it was niche. Prior to 1960 was effectively nil.

Really, widespread air travel is that recent:

<https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter5/air-transpo...>

1980: ~1,000 billion passenger/km.

2019: ~8,500 billion passenger/km.

Global population's increased, but by less than 2x.

If you go back to 1960, the chart is stuck to the floor.

I've had a call out for further stats with no responses yet:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34499787>

Can't they get their 'fix' by applying a nicotine patch to their neck, or something?

I'm actually not aware of any studies that separate nasal and oral snuff usage that show that nasal snuff is correlated with cancers.

I mean... intuitively, it seems like it should be, as the membranes there aren't substantially different - but it's odd that it's not been studied in particular.

When air travel was in its infancy, banning smoking was just not something anyone would have even thought about. It was everywhere.

Dunno, but can’t imagine flying in China without a cig & beer near the gate.

And buses!

Well, in the early days of aviation lung cancer was, erm, pretty far down the list of hazards.

Commercial aviation in the 60's was quite safe. Of course there were plenty of issues but the truly dangerous era was the preceding decades. The 747 dates from the very late 60's for example and that's an extremely safe plane. Conversely the 50's was a much scarier decade as commercial jet engines were in a fairly experimental decade.

I believe in the 50s, commercial flights were propeller planes.

The first commercial jet airliner, the de Havilland Comet, debuted in 1952, though it was retired shortly after due to mulltiple airframe losses due to structural fatigue.

The Boeing 707 entered service in 1957, and is probably most associated with the start of the jet age.

Most commercial flights were likely propeller-driven aircraft through the 1950s, but some jet travel had begun by the end of the decade.

Edit: I've spent some time trying to find stats on flights / passenger miles by aircraft type for the 1950s & 1960s without luck. That'd be an interesting add to this thread if anyone has the information.

I do find total passenger and freight data here: <https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter5/air-transpo...>

As of 1960, both categories were effectively nil. Passenger travel hit 1,000 billion passenger-km around 1980, the pre-2020 peak was about 8,500 billion passenger-km. Data based on IATA.

The 60s is hardly the birth of passenger aviation.

Just among currently operating airlines… KLM 1919, Qantas 1920 Aeroflot (and several other European flag carriers) 1923, Delta 1925

Like, this is what the actual early days of the airlines looked like; https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ab/St...

What a beautiful picture, thank you.

Fair enough. I was thinking purely of the jet era, since that's what we're still in, of course, and where the most passengers could be disturbed by smokers. Since you meant the real early days of aviation, I would of course agree that the concerns of passengers back then were much greater than someone smoking.

Smoking on US flights was banned in 1988.

Seems you never were on a smoking flight. Planes have excellent air conditions. It was not like the whole plane up in smoke. You could smell it a little on a non smoking seat but it was quite mild.

Hard disagree. I flew lots in the 80s and you could be halfway back in the non-smoking section and still smell it constantly. They had curtains separating the smoking/non-smoking sections but so many people went back/forth that their body movement would “drag” the smoke back down the aisle with them as they walked. Then on top of that the smokers going back to the bathroom would make sure they’d taken a huge puff before heading back, breathing out along the way, because heaven forbid they go a few minutes without a lungful.

Smoker's people sense of smell is severely compromised. They have no clue how strong the smell is.

I suspect they also don’t really want to know how strong and obnoxious the smell is to the rest of us.

Only speaking for myself as a smoker: I can smell it very prominently indoors without powerful ventilation. I don’t like it for me and don’t want to inflict it on others. I either steer clear of people outdoors, or put it out if they’re going to be nearby. The only exception is if they want to interact with me individually while I’m smoking, then I stand as far away as I can for the interaction they invited.

I wish all smokers were as considerate as you are.

I think this changed with increase in non-smoking areas.

Back a few decades it was normal that cigarette smoke was everywhere. Trains, restaurants, offices, factories, at home, ... it was just normal. Nowadays in many places it is more notable.

When I was a child I hated going to restaurants in the winter because we'd have to sit in a cloud of smoke.

Otherwise at home and school there was no smoke.

Smoke was theoretically already forbidden everywhere but nobody cared.

Absolutely not so. Smoking on airplanes was exactly as it sounds like - what you get when people smoke inside a metal cylinder packed with people. I used to fly all the time for work back then, international/intercontinental. It was bad. Very bad. Some airlines even experimented with "smoking zone on the right side, non-smoking on the left side".. what an idea. If this was today I couldn't fly at all, I've become so physically sensitive to tobacco smoke from all the passive exposure over the years. Throat contracts painfully long before I even smell the smoke and I just can't take it.

As for the air inside airplanes.. occasionally an Einstein will enter an airplane using perfume. It's hell. Airplanes have sometimes needed to perform emergency landings just to save the life of other passengers with perfume allergy. As for myself, if someone uses perfume I have to ask to get a seat half a cabin away. I don't get an allergic (breathing) reaction, just physical pain. So much for the supposed excellent air conditions.

I do get breathing reaction, it's not funny. And I start sneezing and coughing so everyone starts looking at me like I have covid, very amusing. The thing is, a smoker can't really smell how bad it is unless they stop smoking for a while. This is very apparent when you get an ex-smoker into an elevator with a heavy smoker. Did this with a working buddy and he was looking sideways at me and then asking "Was I really that bad?". Yes, yes you were my friend. Glad you are off it :-)

The navy didn't ban smoking on subs until 2010. That must have been something.

But subs get deployed for 6 months at a time. Unless they banned smokers from getting into subs??

You don't have to ban smokers to ban smoking on a sub. Smokers don't have to smoke, they merely choose to do so.

I think this is bad idea. Maybe have a special room for smoking?

> Smokers don't have to smoke, they merely choose to do so.

Some people are legitimately addicted. I know for a fact that I am not (I can go for a month without smoking and I won't go crazy) but removing smoking or nicotine will be a major quality of life downgrade for me.

>Some people are legitimately addicted.

And some people aren't fit to serve on submarines.

We’re talking about serving on a submarine, in the military. Quality of life takes a back seat to health and safety, performance, and the mission itself. Personal space and weight are extremely limited on board.

What you’re suggesting is that smokers be given special accommodation by having their own room for smoking. Furthermore, they would need to be provided with special equipment to filter the air to remove all of the smoke produced by their smoking, otherwise it would spread throughout the other compartments as soon as they open the door to leave the smoking room.

Is any of this reasonable? I don’t think it is. The only reasonable accommodation I can think of would be to allow smokers to bring a supply of nicotine gum or patches.

> The only reasonable accommodation I can think of would be to allow smokers to bring a supply of nicotine gum or patches.

Fair enough.

As an ex-smoker, I'd ask you to consider it as about the most addictive thing going.

Think of something you really, really like doing. Something that calms or pleases you every time you do it. Like, playing a game, or reading a book, or eating your favourite food. Now imagine someone telling you that you don't have to do that, it's just a choice. Imagine being deprived of it and being guilt-tripped into it.

Sure you can wean yourself off it, but it'll take effort - uncomfortable, painful effort - and you might fail.

And meanwhile some idiot on the internet is saying it's all just a choice.

It is an addiction that was designed to be addictive by the manufacturers. It has never been a "mere choice". That first cigarette or two, maybe, but addiction is awful and horrible and doesn't deserve to be denigrated and reduced by flippancy.

My father smoked for many years before quitting. I have two roommates that are smokers. The difference between him and them is that he wanted to quit, so he did. They continue to smoke because they do not want to quit. It’s as simple as that.

Right, so the reason there are thousands of books and methods about quitting smoking isn’t because it’s hard, it’s because people don’t really want to. Or maybe they’re stupid? Got it.

I didn’t say it was easy, or that people who smoke are stupid, I said it was a choice. If you choose to quit smoking then you’ll succeed.

Ah, the Yoda solution. "There is no try."

Want to quit != want to want to quit, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-order_volition

There are literally millions of people who choose to quit smoking and fail, every single day.

I don't think it's 'fail' so much as 'change their mind'.

I know several people (including family members) who spent several decades "trying" to quit smoking, but "couldn't"... until they started having health problems and a doctor told them very clearly and in a serious tone that if they didn't quit, they would die.

At that point, they quit literally overnight and never went back. And I'm using "literally" literally here.

So yes, I know it's hard, but I'm pretty sure people who don't manage to quit just don't want to quit hard enough. They "want" to in the same sense that I want to learn martial arts: I've always thought that it would be great to master a martial art, and sometimes fantasize with it, but I know fully well that I'm never going to do it because I'm not willing to do what it takes (the time, the discipline, receiving blows, etc.)

In other words, I don't think wanting to snap a finger and magically never feel like smoking anymore qualifies as wanting to quit smoking.

You have to want to change to be able to change. This isn't news.

But even then, different people have different responses to addiction and some people find it easier than others.

Willpower is not evenly distributed across the population. Resilience to uncomfortable situations is a muscle that has to be trained, and you need that before you can tackle addiction, and keep working on it.

I'm pleased for your father, but your roommates are not the same person, and comparing them as if they are entirely equivalent is unfair to them AND your father. Your father had experience, willpower and resilience that your roommates do not yet have, and that's not their fault.

When/if you encounter addiction writ large - drugs, alcohol, gambling - the stuff that gets real crazy real quick, you might see the problem and the difficulties associated it, and the nuance of an addiction that gets at somebody that does not have immediate consequences but delayed consequences. You might then get why your father did very well, and your roommates are relatively blameless in this regard.

I mean, unless as a child you had abusive parents who forced you to smoke, it’s absolutely a choice.

There are people who can’t stop doing stupid stuff for attention (like breaking electronics for YouTube views or whatever), and we don’t blame “idiots” commenting online for their habits. There are people who refuse to eat vegetables and only eat junk food and we also don’t blame “idiots.”

Yes. It’s addictive. But personal responsibility is admitting you made bad choices that led to bad habits and only you, through your own effort, can fix it.

Countless people never smoked. Countless people stopped. Some people act like quitting smoking is some insufferable thing that others will never understand. Everyone has bad stuff they do that’s just as hard to quit. There are loads of people who are glued to chairs all day and make bad food and exercise decisions and it becomes a lifelong habit that’s borderline impossible to break (doubly so if you face health consequences before you can change), but they don’t get sympathy. People tell them to simply make an effort to change if they actually want to change.

> Yes. It’s addictive. But personal responsibility is admitting you made bad choices that led to bad habits and only you, through your own effort, can fix it.

We don't trust kids with making contracts/permanent choices for good reasons. And it is easy to get roped into smoking to fit in as a kid. So, I disagree on it being a choice in all situations.

Do you say this to all addicts?

There are countless reasons people make bad choices: peer pressure, to calm anxiety, dealing with depression, and yeah, sometimes, abusive parents.

But you are refusing them their status of victim of circumstance and saying "well, sucks to be you", and taking the high ground. Good for you, it must be great up there never having made a bad choice.

The moment somebody makes a poor choice does not mean we should then insist the game is over for them and it's their fault. That doesn't help them make better choices in future.

Quitting smoking is incredibly hard. I've done it multiple times sometimes for years at a time - that's how hard it is - and you will never understand it unless you've personally suffered from addiction yourself.

Do you think the attendees at Alcoholic Anonymous who stand up and say "I'm an alcoholic and haven't had a drink in 25 years" are being absurd, or speaking to a truth about addiction? Why do you think smokers have an easier time of it?

I've not smoked in almost 6 years today. In a poor context, in a poor moment, I could be back in there in a heartbeat.

It's not insufferable - I've suffered it - but you clearly and blatantly will never understand it.

So please, get off the high horse, accept everybody makes poor choices in life, some of those can lead to a very tough addiction, and addiction can lead to poor health outcomes that are incredibly hard to resolve despite wanting to make changes for the better. A little more empathy could serve you well.

Adults are responsible for themselves, and smoking is absolutely a choice regardless addiction status.

If you can't control yourself and be responsible, you shouldn't be in the military let alone manning a submarine.

I kindly suggest that you google "Is addiction a choice?" and "Is smoking addictive?" and learn a few things before taking such an absolutely absurd high-ground devoid of empathy or experience of either subject from the perspective of the person addicted to smoking.

If the bar for joining the military or manning a submarine is that you had never made a poor choice in your adult life, it would be impossible to recruit. All humans make poor choices, and for all sorts of reasons. Smoking is just one example that many people - yourself included - seem quick to condemn without understanding.

I'm overly simplifying, but if policy is to not smoke and you can't (or refuse to) follow orders, you're out. Dishonorable discharge.

Adults are not children, much less military personnel. Smoking is a choice and you are responsible for your choices. "It's an addiction." is a lazy, irresponsible excuse and escape.

You're confusing new choices with consequences of previous ones. Taking up smoking when you're fully aware that your job prohibits you from smoking is a choice and you're right - "It's an addiction" would be a poor excuse.

Quoting the context from a few replies ago:

> You don't have to ban smokers to ban smoking on a sub. Smokers don't have to smoke, they merely choose to do so.

Being asked to quit an addiction on demand is completely different, you don't "merely choose" to smoke every day. That's what makes it so difficult to escape addiction, it's not merely a choice like what you're going to have for lunch. Once you're addicted, your body psychologically and physically compels you to do it.

Would you say that giving up your passwords under the threat of being beaten with a $5 wrench is merely a choice? Addiction is like that, but it's your brain holding the $5 wrench.

Do you "get asked" to serve on a submarine, or do you apply to serve on a submarine?

What next, are you going to obligate the military to provide all the alcohol and hard drugs any addict may desire in the next 6 months?

There's so many reasons you get disqualified from serving in certain positions in military. Being addicted is just one of them.

Please don't shift the goal posts, the argument I was responding to said that continuing to smoke is merely a choice. I'm not arguing that smoking should be allowed on submarines or anything of the sort, just dispelling this one specific falsehood that attempts to paint addicts as lazy or otherwise inferior just because they can't wake up one day and quit their addictive behavior.

> you are refusing them their status of victim of circumstance

smokers are not victims of circumstance.

Yes, they are.

We'll have to agree to disagree. I believe someone coming in contact with second hand smoke is a victim of circumstance, but someone doing the actual smoking did so on their own free will.

I'll repeat this again in the hope you'll reflect on it: your statement suggests you do not understand addiction.

Addiction subverts free will.

Smoking is no less a serious form of addiction than any other you can imagine, the only difference is the consequence to other people is curtailed in comparison.

Agree to disagree as much as you want: you come across as plain ignorant in the eyes of anybody who understands the issue.

> Countless people never smoked. Countless people stopped. Some people act like quitting smoking is some insufferable thing that others will never understand. Everyone has bad stuff they do that’s just as hard to quit.

While smoking is a choice, not all choices are the same. Not all choices are weighted by a chemical addiction, comparing quitting smoking to bad food or exercise choices trivialises it in an unnecessary way.

Breaking an addiction is difficult, but smoking is one of the hardest addictions to break. I would imagine that heroin is more difficult to quit, but I can't think of any other addictions that are as difficult to break as nicotine.

If you have no experience of this (and it seems that you do not so apologies if you do) then a simple way to understand how difficult it is quit is not to think of it as a single choice to make. Imagine making the most difficult choice of your life, against everything that your body and brain is telling you - something that requires an extraordinary act of will and self-faith. The reward for making the correct choice is not an end to the matter - it will push it to one side for about 15-20 seconds. Then another wave of chemical addiction will wash over you, everything in your life will pale into insignificance and you will be faced with exactly the same choice again. This will repeat without end, asleep or awake, until you break the first part of the addiction. It will only take two or three weeks of these constant life changing choices, and you must make the correct choice every single time, but it will feel like an eternity.

If you make it through that initial period then it gets easier, but that sequence of life-changing choices won't really end for about six months, although you will gain more confidence that you are making the right choice through that time.

Several years later you will reach a point where you no longer have to choose and you have genuinely become a non-smoker. It is a long difficult road, but it is possible and many people do it. Believing that is almost impossible while you are still addicted, and find that believe that you personally are mentally strong enough to endure that cycle of choice and longing is the most difficult step of all.

So, yes it is a choice - but that does not make it the same as other things that are a choice. Some choices are more difficult than others, and to put all choices into a single category and assume they are the same is to under-estimate the range of difficulty that exists across different choices.

Food is incredibly addictive. Sugar stimulates the same pathways as opiates and provides instant massive hits of dopamine.

Many people who manage to lose weight end up relapsing. Most people end up gaining all the weight back. [1]

It’s far higher than the relapse rate amongst former smokers. And really, just look at exploding obesity rates around the world.

Yes, smoking is a choice. Yes, people will mock smokers for crying and saying it’s not their fault. Yes, admitting personal responsibility and making personal effort is the best way to overcome it. Smoking is addictive, but so is loads of stuff. It sucks, but most people get through life choosing to never start.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5764193/

Throwaway account for obvious reasons.

When I was a kid I knew I would drink, from about the age of 8. I don't know why, I just knew - although I didn't start till I was around 13. I never thought I would smoke, even though most of the adults I knew did smoke. As for why I started - I was at a party, around 14 years old, and the host's parents locked the booze away - so I thought "I'll do this instead".

In my experience (and I'm no expert and I'd never want to put words into anyone else's mouth), addiction is a mixture of different factors. There's why you started in the first place, there's a psychological need that is going unfulfilled, there's habit and there's actual physical addiction.

For me:

LSD - not a problem. I had a great night out, thought "that will never be bettered" so never took it again.

MDMA/Ecstasy - again, not a problem. It was entirely situational - go out clubbing, take some pills - and when I stopped clubbing I stopped taking it.

Cannabis - I smoked weed constantly for around 10 years, often rolling one up last thing at night so it was the first thing I did in the morning. I stopped when I actually had to start working for a living and I couldn't afford the lack of time it caused. So I would say it was basically habit and boredom that kept me at it.

Drinking - I used to drink heavily, daily, for many many years. I was never a "hide the vodka in the toilet cistern" type, I just would go out and have a drink and not stop till I fell asleep. Eventually a combination of health issues and being fed up with wondering if I'd made a fool of myself last night made me try to stop. And it was HARD. I never had serious physical symptoms, but alcohol is everywhere. It's changed a bit now, but buying soft drinks when out was frowned upon and so many of my routines involved it. I stopped with the help of reddit (r/stopdrinking is the most wonderful place on earth full of kind and supportive people) and lots of fizzy drinks and ice cream (and yes, I put on weight, but I figured one issue at a time, and now I've lost that weight and am much healthier all round). Definitely habit, social/psychological and physical.

Cocaine - 2 spells using cocaine heavily. Once I used to use it to get me out of bed in the morning, but it was easy to stop. Second time I used it every day for around 18 months. I think this was because I was in a bad way mentally and I just needed to silence the noise in my head. It's actually very difficult to take cocaine like that - it doesn't last long, it hurts, your nose is constantly blocked and it's a pain to prepare. For me, psychological void.

Nicotine - the hardest of the lot to stop. Sort of. I read the Allen Carr book and stopped smoking 20 per day almost immediately. But I just couldn't stop smoking when I went out - it was intrinsically linked with "having a good time" (see why I started). Like cocaine, it's short-lived, but it's so easy to "top up" again, so you gain a series of little "boosts" throughout the day. Of course, you need the boosts because your brain stops functioning as it wears off. So it builds habits and has a physical effect. In the end I got hypnotised which helped me stop when going out - but I still often ask friends if I can hold their cigarettes, just so I've got something in my fingers. This is a mix of all of the factors combined.

Caffeine - never been an issue for me - I feel like it has no effect whatsoever. But the people who say "don't speak to me before I've had some coffee" certainly sound like I did when I was using cocaine.

I would say in none of the cases were "effort" and "willpower" part of what made me stop - I had to figure out why it was happening and deal with the underlying causes.

> Caffeine - never been an issue for me - I feel like it has no effect whatsoever. But the people who say "don't speak to me before I've had some coffee" certainly sound like I did when I was using cocaine.

I don’t have notable experience with addictive-type substances other than caffeine, but I can chime in there - I went cold-turkey from drinking 4-5 cups of coffee per day, and I was pretty surprised by how awful I felt the first day. Two days later I felt perfectly fine without caffeine.

Now I drink one cup per day, only before noon, often decaf. If I skip a day, I don’t notice any effect.

For me quitting smoking was much easier than certain other things that I haven’t been able to quit yet (eg social media and sugar). Smoking I just decided to stop one day and that was it.

So it probably varies a lot based on the person.

> I mean, unless as a child you had abusive parents who forced you to smoke, it’s absolutely a choice.

My mother started at 11. It's actually very typical for a smoker to start around that young. Many drug addicts are first exposed to the drug before their minds are anywhere nearly developed. They never had a chance to make anything like an informed adult choice. It's one of the saddest aspects of it.

Curious, did you start smoking in your teens? I smoked hookah every day for about a year when I was 25 because I vastly preferred it to going out to bars and it seemed to be an acceptable social alternative. Then I quit. I never crave cigarettes, unless I walk by a group of smokers then I might bum one. I’ve probably smoked 5 cigarettes in the last few years.

When I vaped for a little while like five years ago to see if it’d help concentration I wouldn’t crave it exactly, more like if I had it I’d just pull it out absentmindedly and puff on it until it was empty.

Anyway my working theory is when you start has a lot to do with getting addicted.

Some people find It easier to quit, some people just can't do it. Some people manage to smoke one cigarette a day. Some people either quit for good or they get back at smocking two packs a day.

I started when I was 18. Drunk, social pressure, became hooked immediately. Took me 5 years to give up the second time. After 3 years social pressure led to me taking it up again for 12 years. I've now been a non-smoker for just under 6 years. It's still hard.

I think any addiction is hard to walk away from once it's had you for a while, it's why addiction support groups exist. Alcohol, gambling and drugs can cause real chaos in the very short term whereas smoking can take years to cause serious damage, so people reduce it in terms of impact, but it's no different to any other form of addiction in terms of its difficulty to get away from.

So when people act flippantly towards it, I realise they've had the good fortune of never having to deal with addiction in their lives. Good for them, but I really wish people had an ounce of common human empathy in them when talking about this. It's tough, and they clearly don't understand that.

Nicotine addiction is real, but cigarettes aren’t the only way to administer it. I’d imagine many smokers on a sub use an alternative rather than stop.

As an ex smoker, I found quitting smoking one of the easiest things to do, just knew and decided it is time to stop now.. so I'm always surprised why is that. Also recently just going interval fasting for first time in my life because becoming a bit fat, not any problem, at all strangely.

I wonder why that is, I wouldn't think I have a super strong will or just cannot be addicted, if I consider gaming or other procrastination habits..

But what definitely please shouldn't be done here is to put it into a category of "the most addictive thing" where really just heroine, true aclohol addiction, and similar drugs belong. Heroine/alcohol is nearly impossible to fight through with just own willpower. Objectively!

I quit drinking and smoking. Of those drinking was probably harder but neither was very hard for me.

The key is to avoid situations that trigger your addiction. Don’t buy any of the products. Don’t hang around people that use them. Don’t go to places where people use them. And so on. This might mean you need to get new friends. It’s unfortunately the way it is.

That’s why it’s harder to quit more ubiquitous things (like eating sugar). And it probably varies from person to person

Well done for quitting.

Now, perhaps, imagine for one second, your experience is not like other people's.

Objectively, based on actual studies, smoking is incredibly hard to quit.

Please don't try and undermine that because you sit at the edge of the distribution curve. I'm glad that you do, but you are an outlier, and don't get to condemn all the other evidence on the basis of that.

Food is more addictive, because even if you break the worst habits you have to continue to eat.

That's untrue. You (maybe) choose to start smoking, but once you have started, choice is entirely taken away from you.

Incidentally, that's precisely what helped me quit (a long time ago): I realized I was a slave to the cigarette and the only way to be free again was to stop it altogether. It was one of the hardest thing I ever had to do. I stayed in bed for four days trying to think about something else and sleeping it through. And then it wasn't over for a couple of weeks.

I always describe quitting smoking as both the easiest and the hardest thing I have ever done. I wanted to quit for so long and suffered many, many failed attempts. I tried all kings of methods, acupuncture, gum, etc. All to no avail. In hindsight I didn't really want to quit. I wanted to quit for my health, for my morning cough, for my wife, for all kinds of reasons. But not really for me. I liked it, and quitting something you want to do doesn't work.

At some point I read the Alan Carr book. I was skeptical but hey, might as well try it, right? Around that time my wife and I were also thinking about kids and I really wanted to quit before she was pregnant. I finished the book, smoked my last cigarette, went to bed, and lasted about 6 hours after waking up before I was back at it again. That night I re-read the last bit of the book, smoked my last cigarette (again) and went to bed.

I haven't touched a cigarette since and it's been very easy. not a single pang or hankering or anything. I can get drunk without wanting a cig. People can smoke around me and I don't care. I'm not an ex-smoker. I'm a non-smoker. Looking back (4 years now) I find it hard to understand myself why I had so much trouble quitting. It's been soooo easy.

But only after I really wanted it for me.

Exactly. The most insidious part of addiction is identifying as an addict. It’s that acceptance of your own addiction as a core part of your identity that makes it impossible to quit. As soon as you change your mind and decide “I am not an addict” you’ll quit instantly.

The addict self-identification is also the reason why people get so defensive about it. People tell them to quit and they treat it like an attack, an injury against their identity, and this cognitive dissonance protects the addiction from being resolved.

Carr's book is underrated by smokers who haven't read it and loved by ex-smokers who have.

Is it worth reading for non-smokers?

Probably, if you have loved ones that smoke. It explains the mindset of smokers.

I wish it was that easy. Smoking is addictive, and I can assure you that quitting requires a lot of effort and in some cases luck too. I was "lucky" enough to be hospitalized for an appendicitis that degenerated into a peritonitis due to a wrong diagnosis just at the right time, that is, in the middle of a local tobacco crisis during a spring in the early 90s when cigarettes were so hard to find that either one knew someone in the black market or had to roll mashed cigar leftovers like I did just before getting ill. Moral of the story, I had been hospitalized for 12 days when I was already smoking a lot less than my usual rate (two full 20 packs/day) and when I was discharged from the hospital I said to myself "it's now or never!" and the rest is history. 30 years have gone and since then I didn't touch any cigarette, cigar, pipe, or anything else because I'm 100% aware that if I'd take a even just single puff for a friend or my girlfriend I'd start again, because I still like that smell unless someone smokes directly in my face.

Exactly. People replying to you are acting like a smoker will literally explode if they don't smoke for a few months. Some of these comments are truly bizzare! We're talking about cigarettes here.

Just like a nonsmoker, smokers are just fine being forced to go without cigarettes while underway. My husband was both a smoker and a submariner at the same time for many years. He couldn't stand vaping or using dip so he was just was forced to go without nicotine for the duration of the underway. Of course he (and the other smokers) were really grumpy about it, but that's it.

I also have smoker relatives who were somewhat frequently hospitalized. You simply can't smoke in a hospital, tough cookies if you want a cigarette. You simply just deal with going without - you can be prescribed nicotine patches is all, which aren't helpful to my family members.

We are talking about people getting annoyed they can't smoke.

I have a friend in Germany who gives up smoking for the entirety of Lent. It always seemed so stupid to me, since if I could have given up for that long, I wouldn't have gone back. I was a smoker for many decades who gave up three months ago, and feel kind of cheated by how easy it was and how little I miss it (wish I had done it far, far earlier).

This narrow view of addiction is also missing the fact that smoking has many positive effects. I smoked from age 13 to age 38, and I’m pretty sure smoking made my life better overall.

Besides allowing me to socialize more easily, it’s an incredibly potent stress reliever which allowed me to deal with sensory overload and other stressors (I’m autistic). Nothing comes even close to how quickly it can defuse stressful situations.

The fact that something nudges you to take a break and a few steps every hour is also something I miss tremendously. I always joked that I was the in-house bug hunter and hard problem solver because I’d walk the stairs every hour and would solve the problem on the way back up.

Now that I’ve quit, many things in my life have become much harder. I need to be conscious of my stress level at all times and plan for mitigation through cardio, ear protection, fixed schedules. A 1h run achieves the same result as a 2 minute cigarette break would, and I have to set an alarm to remind me to take breaks. Because of Covid and consequent work from home, this has all become manageable, but I don’t think I could function in normal society very well without picking smoking back up.

I've got ADHD, and the enforced outdoor smoking gave me the perfect excuse to dip out of any social situation that I found awkward or uncomfortable as well as give me somewhere else to recombobulate. And I agree that it gave you a great break routine that helped productivity, I do miss that a lot.

I'm confused - the comment you are replying to basically says the Navy can freely ban smoking onboard submarines and end up with no real consequences other than some mildly grumpy sailors. It made no moral judgement about smoking or addiction.

Did you mean to reply to another comment?

I was replying at that level to echo the other comments. It's reacting to the "they merely chose to do so" part. It might not be the best parent to reply to, but it's what spawned a whole thread I wanted to sibling.

Is the benefit specific to cigarettes, or does gum/lozenges give you the same stress benefit reduction?

Cigarettes, 100%. gums are not fun and really just help avoid the withdrawal.

I think the real thing people are disagreeing about here is whether you're still a smoker when you're deliberately going 6 months without smoking.

Is 'smoker' a permanent status, like some people consider themselves alcoholics even when they haven't drunk alcohol in a decade? If so, you could have a submarine full of smokers very easily!

But if you're only a smoker if you've had at least 1 cigarette in the past week, your submarine would have no smokers after seven days at sea.

They just have to ban the smoking. Pretty hard to smoke if there are no cigarettes on the ship or if the crew runs over to put out the fire any time you light a cigarette.

Others have designated smoking as a medical condition owing to its physiological addictive qualities. Taking that stance I would just note that the United States Navy bans from operating certain equipment all sorts of people with medical conditions. For example the USN wouldn’t let me, with my 20/400 vision uncorrected anywhere near an F-35C. So I can see banning active smokers from submarines.

Surprisingly this hasn't been answered. Yes, smoking is banned (with probably 3 hours of exception, all at once and in one inconvenient place.) No, smokers aren't banned. They all hate the ban, live with it, and mostly use chewing tobacco. And then they go back to smoking.

It is even better than that. Smokers used to sit and smoke in "non-smoking" to be away from the stale smoke.

It was like this on trains in the UK until fairly recently. The smoking carriage was generally pretty empty, but was frequented by those that needed to get their hit who then returned to the cleaner coaches.

The Long Island Railroad eliminated smoking cars something like twenty-five years ago because they cost so much more to clean.

You could smoke on the Hindenberg. Yes. On a dirigible held aloft by hydrogen, they had a smoking room:(https://www.airships.net/hindenburg-smoking-room/.

> You could smoke on the Hindenberg. Yes. On a dirigible held aloft by hydrogen, they had a smoking room

Seems insane, but I guess they didn't want homicidal nicotine-starved passengers. The article does however go on to say "The smoking room was kept at a higher pressure than the rest of the ship so that no leaking hydrogen could enter the room, and the smoking room was separated from the rest of the passenger section by a double-door airlock." So the designers seem to at least have been aware of the risks.

Hindenberg got a bad rap. It just happened to look scary and was caught on film.

1/3 of the Hindenberg passengers survived the crash. Way better survival rate than plane crashes.

It was better. About ⅔ survived. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_disaster:

“The accident caused 35 fatalities (13 passengers and 22 crewmen) from the 97 people on board (36 passengers and 61 crewmen), and an additional fatality on the ground.”

That’s still worse than modern airplanes, though. https://www.euronews.com/travel/2022/06/15/how-to-survive-a-...:

“According to a study by the European Transport Safety Council, plane crashes technically have a 90% survivability rate”

How frequent are plane crashes compared to hydrogen filled dirigibles?

Data on hydrogen filled dirigibles is hard to come by, but I think modern commercial airliners crash less often than them.

Certainly, the 1930s ones do not look good. The first Graf Zeppelin made 590 flights before being scrapped, the second 30, and Hindenburg crashed on its 63th flight. That’s a crash in less than 1000 flights.

For comparison, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747 says “The 747SR had an economic design life objective of 52,000 flights during 20 years of operation, compared to 24,600 flights in 20 years for the standard 747.”, so I assume Boeing thinks there’s a good chance those airplanes will live that long.

Thats a good questions for a statistician.

# of airships vs # of Airplanes, over various time periods, various safety improvements (hydrogen to helium for airships, plastics instead of steel vs self-flying & landing planes and propellers to jet engines, things like that)

The one thing planes have over airships is speed. The faster airships topped out at 80-90mph at the same time planes were pulling 200mph.

Now planes can be supersonic while I can't really imagine dirigibles going more than 150-200 mph max.

Worse than that, they couldn't use Helium due to a US ban. I mean, I know why the US did it, but it wasn't the Hindenburg's designer's fault.

Admirial Cloudberg covered at least one crash caused by fire caused by a cigarette. The response from the industry: smoke alarms. Banning smoking too was unthinkable!

Brand new aircraft still include fixtures to stub out cigarettes in the bathrooms, because it doesn't matter if you declare that something's forbidden, people will do it anyway and you need to do what you can to minimise harm.

The ashtray is required equipment, and you can't legally dispatch the airplane if it is inoperative, unless you disable that lavatory. Truth! 14 CFR 25.853 (g)

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-C...

Won’t smoking in an airplane bathroom set off an alarm?

Yes. The person triggering the alarm will still likely look for a place to extinguish the cigarette, and pretend they've done nothing wrong. The ashtray thing is there because otherwise those idiots will put the burning cigarette in the trash or in the tank with chemicals in which it might just cause a pile-up of debris and clogs.

I'd put this a bit differently, though with the same general idea:

- The alarm will alert flight attendants to the situation, allow them to identify the violator of the non-smoking regulation, of the potentially hazardous situation (open flame in an aircraft), and if necessary bar the person from future flights.

- The ashtray will likely prevent a lit cigarette from burning down the aircraft in flight if improperly disposed of with, say, dry paper trash.

A smouldering cigarette in a rubbish bin could imperil the entire flight, passenger manifest, and crew.

I think you misremember. The cause of the fire on Air Canada flight 797 was never conclusively determined; a cigarette could not be completely ruled out, but was deemed very unlikely.

Smoking culture was a contributing cause since it made fires in trash bins so common that the pilots didn't react with urgency to a fire that looked like that (but in that case was definitely not).

Having smoke alarms was absolutely the correct response, because smoking is by no means the only cause of fires on airplanes. In fact, I'm not even sure there has been a single fatal crash involving fire that has been definitely caused by smoking, but there are many that are known to have been caused by other things, such as Nigeria Airways Flight 2120, Swissair flight 111, ValuJet flight 592 and China Airlines Flight 120.

I don't think an accident ever occurred because of smoking in the cabin? (Possibly one because of smoking in the lavatory, and I'm not even sure).

For smokers, going 4, 6 or 9 hours without smoking is just unthinkable; I know it was for me. So glad I quit (a very long time ago), but I don't know how smokers deal with it today.

Do nicotine patches, gum, etc. not work? (Serious question)

I never tried those but it seems they kind of work, yes? But some people seem to dislike them a lot.

I quit smoking the old-fashioned way so I don't have a first-hand experience in that matter, but I was thinking a lot about this once. I belive patches and gums may not work in every instance. Please let me provide some context.

I was smoking for around 7 years, from my late teens (jus a couple smokes per day) to my early 20' (1.5–2 packs per day). I haven't smoked in quite a few years, I think it's close to 10 years, I don't count anymore.

I have never felt addicted to nicotine. To cigarettes, yes. I was addicted to all those little smoking rituals, gestures, and to all that social behaviour around smoking. I liked going out on the balcony in the morning in my bathrobe just to smoke. Or go out to the garden with another smoker after a party and have a conversation that wouldn't otherwise happen. Hell, I even liked the gesture of shaking the ashes off a cigarette.

Smoking was also a way to deal with boredom for me, a bit like a smartphone now. I'm waiting for a bus that won't arrive for 15 minutes? That's a great time to smoke a cigarette or two.

To the point: would nicotine patch help me to quit smoking? Probably yes, on the long run. Would gum / snuff / snus limit my craving to cigarettes to the point where I could work in a completely smoke-free place? I do not think so.

I find they do not work. I suspect it's because there are two components to continued smoking. The first is the nicotine addiction. The second is the sensory experience. The act of smoking becomes such an ingrained habit it's hard to stop even when you don't feel cravings. And smoking is pleasurable and relaxing in a way patches and gum aren't. Plus, the gums taste foul and make your throat feel weird.

There are plenty of reasons why people shouldn't be flying planes. Being unable to not smoke is not really any different from being unable to resist getting drunk or falling asleep, as far as safety people have to be concerned. It fundamentally doesn't matter if it's "your fault" or "addiction" or a "medical reason"...

Someone posted a link:

https://greekreporter.com/2022/04/30/2016-egyptair-plane-cra...

What about smoking in restaurants? You're trying to enjoy the taste of delicious food, and suddenly the tobacco smoke from the next table wafts into your nostrils. Bizarre that that was ever considered normal.

I wouldn't stand it right now, but it was everywhere so it wasn't annoying. I think smell adjusts to certain things not just temporarily but also on some longer periods. As a kid I wouldn't notice which friends parents smoked at home and which didn't, even though I came from a non-smoking home. And most of them lived in small apartments, so it must have been reeking.

I don’t smoke, but my mom smokes heavily. Whenever my wife (whose parents did not smoke) and I visit my parents, she always remarks afterwards on how terrible the smell was but I never really notice it at all despite having lived on my own for 15+ years now.

I really think it’s just something your brain blocks out, it doesn’t smell like much to me.

When I was an intern in the 1990's, I was on a team of old unix greybeards. Every 20 minutes or so, someone would have to go outside for a smoke break and they invited me along because that's where all the good design discussions would happen. Even today, I immediately recognize the smell of Marlboro Lights if I walk past a group of folks smoking outside.

I grew up in a town with a lot of feedlots, and I still don’t notice the smell when I visit. I definitely think your brain will block out background smells you grow up with. I wonder if that’s how people were able to live in medieval towns without sewers.

I was in morocco last month. everyone smokes there. I'd just be minding my own business whne randos would start lighting up next to me indoors. absolutely zero consideration for how nonsmokers feel about it.

"How the hell someone EVER thought it would be a good idea to let people smoke while packed inside a flying metal cylinder?"

Quite some smokers still think, it is not bad for them, so it can't be bad for others, so why care? I mean, if it would be really unhealthy, they wouldn't do it to themself. Cognitive dissonance is real.

As unhealthy and disgusting as smokers' clouds are, that wasn't the truly dangerous thing.

What was and still is dangerous are the open flames and high temperatures involved with smoking and other flammables. A fire aboard an aircraft can quickly lead to a crash, so the less flammables there are the better.

You don't use fire on airplanes, end of.

Sure, but - statistically/historically - how many fires were recorded in airplanes due to smoking (or to the use of lighter or matches)?

Mind you, I do smoke but still find a good idea to ban smoke on board of aircrafts, though I don't think it has ever been a relevant risk (compared to all the risks implied in flights).

BTW (and AFAIK) the real issue (money) was the cost to the companies of cleaning/replacing the filters of the air circulation that mainly drove - as soon as it could be socially accepted - companies to ban smoking in aircrafts.

    The 2016 EgyptAir plane crash of flight MS804 which had been, at the time, attributed by Egyptian authorities to terrorism, was eventually found to have been caused by the pilot smoking a cigarette in the cockpit, French investigators have concluded.

https://greekreporter.com/2022/04/30/2016-egyptair-plane-cra...

Crashing isn't the only risk:

    In-flight air quality measurements in approximately 250 aircraft, generalised by models, indicate that when smoking was permitted aloft, 95% of the harmful respirable suspended particle (RSP) air pollution in the smoking sections and 85% of that in the non-smoking sections of aircraft cabins was caused by SHS (Second Hand Smoke).

    Typical levels of SHS-RSP on aircraft violated current (PM(2.5)) federal air quality standards approximately threefold for flight attendants, and exceeded SHS irritation thresholds by 10 to 100 times.

    From cotinine dosimetry, SHS exposure of typical flight attendants in aircraft cabins is estimated to have been >6-fold that of the average US worker and approximately 14-fold that of the average person.

Flying the smoky skies: secondhand smoke exposure of flight attendants

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14985612/

Yep, but I was talking of the fire risk only, not of the presumed health ones.

One case (BTW of a cigarette lighted near an open oxigen respirator) doesn't make smoking on board a fire safety risk.

As said, I find a good idea to ban smoking on board (for a number of reasons, including passengers and personnel health ) but not because it is a relevant/meaningful fire hazard.

I remember reading closer to the time they banned smoking on planes of engineers complaining that when people stopped smoking on planes it made it much harder to inspect for hairline cracks! The smoke would highlight the cracks yellow.

Can't find any first hand sources now but this article touches on it:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/opaRvBMRcuk7pWbZD/smoking-ci...

Not sure if it's still allowed in Japan, but I still recall walking through a smoking car on a bullet train on my way to my non-smoking car about 20 years ago and my god, I'm pretty sure there was zero ventilation with the whole car smoking. I had to hold my breath from one end to the other, it was so intense. I can't fathom how people could survive a whole train ride in there while also smoking themselves. I wouldn't be surprised if this is still allowed as smoking is still quite ubiquitous in Japan. They even smoked inside at work. Being from North America, it was like stepping back in time 20 years.

I took the Shinkansen on my last trip to Japan in 2016 and I didn't see any smoking cars, but there were closed-off smoking rooms available on the train with really good ventilation systems.

I read somewhere that banning smoking on planes lead to a lot of deep vein thrombosis cases, as they didn't need to swap the air out as much leading to higher c02 levels.

But stupid shortsightedness aside; it was crazy, they needed to put the smokers (which was me at the time) at the back of the plane as that's the direction of the airflow inside, but the toilets were at the back so everyone had to walk through the smoking section anyway..

A carbon dioxide - DVT link? Sure sounds like bunk. Please be careful of spreading medical misinformation.

Yeah, that one sounds weird on the face of it.

If anything would have an effect, I'd guess the relative absense of nicotine in people would be a big part.

Though I thought nicotine _causes_ blood clots, it's possible that that's a chronic effect and the acute effect would prevent them, I'm not sure.

I can't find the original article, but from Wikipedia(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_vein_thrombosis) [inflammation has been identified as playing a clear causal role] and studies(https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20387988/) ironically tobacco studies, of 5% CO2 show an inflammatory response. Another poster here cited 3% was be the safe limit, so its feasible that turning the system off to save money could put the CO2 over 5% quite quickly. Also the concentration of oxygen is listed on Wikipedia as a direct cause of DVT, which would obviously be affected.

That's talking about lack of oxygen in your blood, not in the air.

I have a lot of experience working long days in a high CO2 environment (did my PhD working in volcanic ice caves). IIRC OSHA rules say 5000ppm (0.5%) is the limit for a 40 hr work week (that's more than 10x atmospheric). There is no way CO2 on planes is getting over 1%--- that would cause a lot of health problems. DVT would not be one of them.

BuildsJets here with your aviation trivia. Cabin Air Quality requirements generally have become a lot more stringent since they were first enacted back in December 1964.

Previously, only the crew was required to be supplied with fresh air, the rest of the cabin was required to be "ventilated" but no ventilation rate was specified, so it was frequently turned off to save fuel or increase power. (This is approved and is still done on some older generation aircraft that are still in service, for instance the Boeing 737NG for certain high performance situations, search 737 Packs Off Takeoff) The current requirement is .55 lbs of outside air per minute per passenger minimum, through all phases of flight. Permissible CO2 has been reduced from 3% in 1964 to 0.5%. today. The carbon monoxide requirement is unchanged at 1 part per 20,000. Multiple other requirement changes, but those are the ones that are specific and measurable.

Current requirements are published in 14 CFR 25.831: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-C...

Original requirements are on page 47 of this PDF: https://archives.federalregister.gov/issue_slice/1964/12/24/...

> Previously, only the crew was required to be supplied with fresh air, the rest of the cabin was required to be "ventilated" but no ventilation rate was specified, so it was frequently turned off to save fuel or increase power. (This is approved and is still done on some older generation aircraft that are still in service, for instance the Boeing 737NG for certain high performance situations, search 737 Packs Off Takeoff)

How does that work though? The cabin pressurization requires constant bleed air from the engines because there are intentional leaks. So the air is constantly renewed anyway.

The cabin air pressure requirement (psi) is more or less a constant, but the cabin air flow rate requirement (lbm/min) is a variable which depends on the number of passengers on board, the air temperature conditioning requirements, the cargo being carried, the altitude (outside air pressure), and the age/condition of the aircraft. (Things like rubber door seals are not perfect and develop leakage rates over time. Sometimes you can even hear it if you are near the door.) The engine pressure regulating/shutoff valve and the cabin outflow valve position are regulated by the pilot (legacy aircraft) or by the digital cabin pressure control system (current aircraft) to maintain the required flow and pressure (cabin altitude setting).

In ye olden days before a DCPCS, not only were the flow requirements not as stringent, but there was culture of "cheating the chart" when manually setting the system. More airflow = more fuel burn, and at one time pilots were compensated for minimizing fuel burn. Anyone can see that this is a perverse incentive from a safety standpoint, just look at what former astronaut Hoot Gibson did to the passengers on his 727 trying to save a buck and playing flight test pilot with paying passengers onboard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_841_(1979)

Also, from a cabin crew perspective, drowsy passengers are conveniently compliant passengers.

I worked at a place where a floor of an office building was converted to a data center starting in the 70s. In doing so, they built a false wall in front of the windows.

Early in my career I worked in backups, and we had a dedicated fiber network, which ran in the space between the windows and fake wall. I had to do some maintenance back there and it was shocking - the windows were coated in this nasty yellow residue and smelled vaguely like cigarettes, even after almost 20 years.

The old timers laughed at my horror and said that people would sit at their desks and smoke packs of cigarettes, every day. At one point there was an employee who would wheel a cart around collecting ashes. The ubiquity of smoking was shocking to me - I’m glad it’s behind us.

"the windows were coated in this nasty yellow residue and smelled vaguely like cigarettes"

I painted a room in my parent's home after decades of smoking that occurred long before and after I was born. First step was to wash the thick layer of nicotine and tar off of the walls using Trisodium Phosphate or other strong cleaner. A stain blocking primer, typically used for smoke damage from fires, was then applied, and then you can paint. Even then, you could still detect the faint odor of cigarettes. Nasty stuff.

Side comment, but the old paper-wrapped bubblegum cigarettes were elegantly designed with some white dust coating the bubblegum keeping it from sticking to the paper. And if you put it in your mouth and blew, it would make a puff of smoke!

The candy design was equally as good as the product was terrible (for all the obvious reasons).

I remember flying to Australia from London as a 9 year old UM (unaccompanied minor) and they plonked me next to a man who Chainsmoked the whole flight there

the horror...

I remember in the late 70’s or early 80’s riding my bicycle to the convenience store to buy my mother a carton of cigarettes.

Technically I think you needed to be seventeen to purchase them in Michigan at that time, but I just told the person behind the counter I was buying them for my mother. I was around ten years old.

> Smoking or non?

For places without actually separated rooms, I remember this being described as having a pissing area in a swimming pool.

Man, chocolate cigarettes. I remember those. Bizarre to think back to that. I'd never consider giving them to my children, but despite the fact that my parents didn't smoke and didn't want us to smoke, I still got these on occasion. And as a young kid, I definitely thought they were cool.

But as I got a bit older, certainly as a teenager, when almost all of my friends started to smoke, I've always considered smoking disgusting and was never even tempted to try it myself. I was happy to be the only non-smoker of the group, and was always careful to stay upwind of the group.

In retrospect, it's ridiculous that as a kid, I'd make clay ashtrays in school for my non-smoking parents. I'm not sad to see ashtrays disappear at all. They may have been pretty, but we could also make other things prettier. Why don't we do that?

Yeah, just make cool looking flower pots and vases. Those can be cool and useful aaaand safe.

Im a smoker, and damn the plane story sounds terrifying. In fact Im smoking now, in my bathroom next to a loud exhaust fan because my wife isn't here. A far cry from when my dad used to smoke next to me while I was doing my homework :D

In fact in my city, Hong Kong, they are now under 10% of the population smoking, and on the street, when I smoke at the ashtray reserved for that on top of the public trashes (yeah, it's not a luxury habit anymore), people wave their hands in front of their nose while passing, "loudly" signaling my alien nature, something I had never experienced in France where I come from.

I'm surprised people are so judgmental there. In my experience (having worked a lot with tourists) Chinese people were noticeably inconsiderate in public, like farting, spitting in public etc. Maybe I'm generalizing but there really was a noticeable pattern.

I think it's surprising that this is such a hangup for them especially outdoors.

I've never smoked but I don't mind if people do and I find all the health and safety rules a bit annoying these days. I miss the smokey boozy bars way after closing time. These days everything is so clean and regulated.

I'll never forget the cigarette vending machines that were in the entrance area of every supermarket around here in the 1970s and 1980s. They had very distinctive clear acrylic "knobs" attached to long metal rods, that you would pull to dispense a pack of cigarettes after depositing money. It was a design unlike any other vending machine I've ever seen.

Something like this: [1]? Not sure if those are in fact not clear acrylic, or just grimed up.

[1]: https://whereandwander.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Vintag...

That's it, though those knobs do look a bit different from what I remember.

You can still find candy cigarettes on Amazon. They used to have candy/gum cigars as well. Anyone remember big league bubble gum? It came in a package similar to that of shredded chewing tobacco, and the gun itself was shredded. It was popular with kids who would mimic their favorite tobacco chewing baseball player. I recently bought a pack I saw for sale to show my kids and instinctively put a wad in my lip when I was a kid.

Good call about candy cigarettes. They were fun as a kid, but demented in retrospect! It makes me think of Saturday Night Live's E. Buzz Miller and his "Bag of Glass" children's toy.

I went to Vegas a couple months ago, and one thing that absolutely blew me away was the fact that, just within the last ~5 odd years since I last visited even the casinos stopped reeking of tobacco. I figured it was a confluence of factors: people smoke less now, people are far more likely to vape than smoke (which, for its ills, definitely doesn't leave a lingering stench like cigarettes), and there was a lot of talk about improved ventilation in response to the pandemic.

Vaping is almost harmless compared to how many diseases smoking tobacco causes and how much it makes a person stink and how much it makes buildings stink and how the tar builds up on walls.

Key word: almost

It's certainly safe enough that the NHS is using vaping to get people off smoking

It’s safer but not as much as not smoking.

Same way chemo cures some cancer but is pretty damaging overall. But when the alternative is death, anything else is better.

PSA: Don’t start vaping if you don’t smoke, it’s lame. Don’t start smoking either, you’ll regret the health issues, earlier death, and money wasted.

So not like my take when I see a pack of Tim Tams with a half-star health rating.. "Hey these things are a little healthy, looks like you need to eat a lot to get any benefit though"

Smoking 10 cigarettes a day is objectively healthier than smoking 20 a day. I'm sure any doctor would recommend the former to someone having the latter as a habit if that would be a successful step to stopping altogether. It doesn't make it something you would recommend for a healthy lifestyle.

I would estimate vaping to be about 1% as harmful as a pack a day smoking habit.

The casinos tend to have amazing ventilation which predates the pandemic. I feel like they have some kind of jet stream above which whisks away the smoke. Much appreciated, for sure!

I was just there in 2021 and the smell was at least as present as it was in 2011 when I was there last. I think if anything, they’ve cut back on the ventilation to save money.

Reno adjacent town, Sparks, opened a brand new casino at the Legends Outlets and we visited on day 2. I made it about 10 feet inside the front doors before turning around and leaving. It smelled of cigarettes. Maybe not in the way it would’ve smelled 10 or 20 years ago, but more than I can take.

Funny, i was there in Sept and I was surprised at how much the smell was still there. Actually, what really surprised me was the gradation between casinos. I had imagined them as being all much the same, plus/minus minor differences due to age. I could not have been more wrong. The wynn was extremely smoke free and evidently spiffed up to strongly appeal to east asian clients (lots of red lacquer and super high end stores). The mgm was more like a bro night out and reeked of smoke. You could smell it even in the (very expensive) restaurants around the edge of the casino floor. So I suppose they havent quite solved the ventilation issues yet.

I shared an office with a smoker back in the day -- one or two smoking visitors would leave a cloud hanging for an hour. About 10 years later (several years into the smoking ban in the U.S. workplace) went on a business trip to Japan where all the smokers at work were confined to a small "smoking lounge." You couldn't see their faces through the window due to the thick smoke! Nowadays I can easily smell someone smoking a block away. It's kinda the same reaction as when a vintage 60's car putts by trailing unburned hydrocarbons...

You ever see the plastic furnishings on those old Japanese business flights that allowed smoking? P h e w

My first computer programming jobs, everybody smoked. Our ADM-3A terminals had cigarette burns on them.

Just missed that. They had been confined to the smoking room however. It stank so badly I brought my own keyboard and mouse in which could not be touched ok penalty of death and a fat can of air freshener.

I used to travel around the world upgrading software and hardware in computer rooms. In one place people smoked in the computer room - because their boss did, so they ignored the ban too. In that one computer room the hard disks had to be reformatted approximately once every two or three months, due to errors (and that would update the internal sector error list so that the disk could continue to function). This never happened anywhere else, the equipment was exactly the same everywhere but disks didn't fail at the other sites. Can't be sure but the only difference with that site was that people smoked in the computer room (those disks weren't airtight).

It's still ubiquitous in China, or at least was when I was there several years ago. On the other hand, perhaps because of that, some of their buildings seem to have insanely powerful ventilation systems. I remember being in a mall and talking with someone who was smoking only a few feet away, seeing the smoke get sucked straight up into the vents on the ceiling as he exhaled, and I couldn't even smell it (I have a rather sensitive nose, and the smell of tobacco is indeed fairly common outdoors.)

Many Vegas casinos have similar ventilation systems, it’s amazing to be near smokers and barely smell it.

Those ventilation systems in Vegas casinos are running at half power or something. I was there in 2011 and 2021 and it seemed like the indoor air was much lousier in 2021. I couldn’t walk from my hotel room to outside without ending up smelling like smoke (this was the MGM Grand). If you want to avoid this in Vegas, Park MGM is the only smoke-free casino hotel on the strip. There are a few hotel-hotels that are smoke-free as well.

OTOH the casino in the Nevada side of Tahoe that I went to a few years ago reeked of smoke. I came out smelling like I was 18 and hitting the UK pubs again (which was late 90s for me).

I had a doctor in the early aughts who was quite old and had been in the same office since the 60s. There was a floor standing ashtray on his office next to the patient chair.

My first thought was “not only has it been a while since it was ok to tell your doctor that you smoked, how long had it been since you could smoke on their office?”

People were desperate for a high, an escape, to kill time, to beat the monotony. Today escape is through junk food.

And video games and porn.

And their phone.

At least it truly is an individual choice now, others can’t get sick from someone else eating junk food.

In my country it went from bars filled with smoke to being banned in enclosed spaces. 3+ walls = enclosed space. Such a breath of fresh air, even the smokers were happy.

The lady who made it into law was in politics for a mere legislature. Not a career politician.

Even the smokers? They were all throwing hissy fits in the US.

Yes, some of them. Everyone was fed up with the smoky places. Actually some bigger places were both smoking and non smoking before. I had a friend who was a smoker. He always chose the non-smoking part and then he moved to the non smoking part whenever he wanted to smoke. The previous law was useless as only places with over 60 square meters were required to have a non smoking part, so most bars were smaller and exclusively smoking.

In Serbia and North Macedonia, smoking is still allowed in hotel rooms. It's awful. I don't recall smoking in closed public spaces though. Most of them were open tavernas during the summer and smoking was allowed.

Hotels used to have smoking and non-smoking rooms around here until some years ago. Now they are all fully non-smoking, and if they notice that a room smells of smoke after you leave your credit card will be charged (a lot), for cleanup. All written up front when you check in.

I used to work with a chain smoker and the first thing he would do when checking into a non-smoking hotel is call the front desk and complain that his room smells like smoke from the previous customer, but refuse to change rooms. Then he smoked continuously during his stay.

In Japan hotels still have smoking rooms, and when I was working there I would get stuck in one about 10% of the time. I would wake up with dry eyes and throat, and a hangover-like headache.

We had a few very heavy smokers at work, and they were pretty loud about the stupidity of the ban in pubs which was coming up. Six months later the smokers agreed that it was much better inside the pubs than before the ban. All the protests just died.

Smoke in bars could be so thick it would sting your eyes and your clothes would reek after you left.

The irony of worrying about your lungs while you're destroying your liver.

That seems like forever ago. If I went into a restaurant today, and the hostess asked me if I was smoking - my first inclination would probably be to do a quick double take and check my clothes to make sure I wasn’t on fire.

I spent my freshman year of high school in rural Kentucky. Many of my classmates lived on tobacco farms. We had a _student_ smoking lounge at school!

We also had a student smoking lounge in my suburban Chicago area high school in 1991! I think you had to have a parent sign a permission slip or something like that, and I don't know how it didn't run afoul of the law as few kids were 18. But it was always packed.

We had an outdoor spot with a roof and one wall called the smoking section. This was in California in 1982. I think they got rid of it in '83.

I was just thinking about how family-oriented restaurants, where you'd typically go to take your young kids out to eat, would have smoking and non-smoking sections. No barriers, just one side of the dining room you could smoke and the other you can't. Millions of parents would regularly take their kids to these places.

These days, it's often a crime to smoke in the car with kids, and exposure to second-hand smoke is seen as child abuse[1], both of which are good things. It's just an interesting contrast to me.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4369587/

Where is it illegal to smoke with a child in the car? Not to get political but we can’t even get people in the US to agree to a bump stock ban.

    15.6.5.2 Legislation banning smoking in cars in Australia

    All Australian states and territories now have legislation in force which prohibits smoking in cars while children are present.

    In June 2006, more than a decade after the issue of smoking in cars was first discussed in Australia, the Tasmanian Government released a discussion paper that included a proposal to ban smoking in cars carrying children in that state.

    In March 2007 a proposal to introduce legislation banning smoking in cars carrying children under 18 was announced.

    A Bill to amend s.67H(2) of the Public Health Act 1997 (Tas.) was passed and came into force on 19 December 2007,iv making Tasmania the first Australian jurisdiction to implement such a ban.

- https://www.tobaccoinaustralia.org.au/chapter-15-smokefree-e...

Red herring. It's an explicit right to own firearms in the US. No one has a right to smoke next to a child explicitly listed in a founding document.

This is why any gun related restriction gets stiff resistance. Contrast this with smoking - generally seen as a social blight. They're not comparable issues at all.

Both speak to the ignorance and "closed-mindedness" Americans are known for, however I see your point. That said, it's worth noting that those who fight for gun rights "because it's in the constitution" are themselves engaging in logical fallacy (appeal to tradition, I believe), and ignoring relevant facts such as the ever-decreasing relevance of firearms in everyday life, and the reduced ability of mere firearms to overthrow a tyrannical government.

There aren't that many people who fight for gun rights "because it's in the Constitution". The vast majority of guns rights advocates own and enjoy using their guns. Their argument is "don't take my rights away". The "It's in the constitution" line is a talking point. There's more to this issue than our news organizations would let us believe.

Firearms have an important role for people who live in remote places - security and food being the most important.

Aside from these reasons, there are many ethical reasons to participate in hunting seasons. Just one example, look up chronic wasting disease in Northern Wisconsin - this prion disease among white tail deer happened because the population became too large in those areas.

The ten most populous cities in the US are where the majority of gun violence occur. Perhaps it's better, then, that these places have more gun restrictions than the people who live in remote places.

In a sense this is actually a cultural issue

Here's a list of states and relevant statutes from 2017[1].

[1] https://publichealthlawcenter.org/sites/default/files/resour...

Notably, none of those list it as a "crime". Instead, it's a civil penalty with a small fine.

A joke, in other words. I didn't think it was "illegal" anywhere in the US. I'm glad to see other countries take it more seriously.

Its been illegal in California since 2008

Sure enough! It's a $100 fine, however police cannot stop a vehicle just for this, it seems[0], so it carries less weight. Better than nothing, though.

[0] https://www.cga.ct.gov/2009/rpt/2009-R-0220.htm#:~:text=The%....

The smoking area was also the prime location in the restaurant! I would often choose to sit there (as a non smoker) just so I didn't have to sit in the back room.

> You would go to a restaurant and the first thing your hostess would ask is "smoking or non"?

In parts of the US this question was common in restaurants through at least the late 90s, maybe a bit longer.

As someone who was a kid during that time period, I heard it many times at a buffet-style steakhouse my family would go to for get-togethers, birthdays, etc. It's fuzzy but I think they may have even still asked into the 2000s. We took the smoking section through most of my childhood since my parents smoked, but they quit later on so we switched.

At least that building was big enough to where the division kind of made a difference… it had a very high ceiling and was huge. It did absolutely nothing in smaller buildings though.

You might be around the same age as me. Michigan didn't ban smoking in restaurants until 2010, when I graduated high school. I think some (most?) restaurants phased it out earlier, but the sort of places we used to hang out at back then in small-town MI certainly did not, so it remained a common part of our lives all through childhood and high school. I kind of forgot about that.

> It did absolutely nothing in smaller buildings though.

I remember restaurants where the nonsmoking section was a little back room, you'd have to walk through all the smoke to get there. Then at some point, it flipped, and that was the smoking section.

I also remember when the Wynn opened in Vegas, and you could gamble without smoke. Still not very fun, but at least I could breathe.

> I heard it many times at a buffet-style steakhouse my family would go to for get-togethers, birthdays, etc.

Sizzler?

Almost half the states still haven't banned smoking indoors in public places:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smoking_bans_in_the_Un...

Still common in bars in those states

Depends on the state. I was surprised to see "no ban" for Virginia on the map, because I haven't seen indoor public smoking, anywhere, since moving here in 2011. Apparently it's allowed in places that have built "structurally separated and ventilated rooms" but nowhere I've been actually does that... I'm sure it's out there but certainly not "common".

When the ban was first instituted in Virginia there was a lot of pushback from restaurant and bar owners, but not many were willing to put their money where their mouth was and invest in separated HVAC systems. For the most part the handful that exist now are smoking-focused, e.g. cigar and whisky bars, which just aren't that popular any more. The one bar I remember well never did better business than the non-smoking bars around it and closed after a few years.

While it is common in some bars, it's no longer common in restaurants at all. I've lived in Texas for 5 years and haven't once seen a restaurant with a smoking section. It's usually outside if at all.

I have nothing against bars allowing smoking if they want, but having grown up with smoking/non-smoking sections I'd never willingly visit a restaurant that allowed smoking. I like to actually be able to taste the food.

I remember visiting Europe a few years ago and being shocked at how much smoking there was. My wife got an outside table at a restaurant only to quickly change our minds when we realized that it was the de-facto smoking section. I appreciate that everyone gets to make their own choices, but you really can’t “get away” from it without moving 50-60 feet. I really appreciate the limited smoking that happens where I live.

> Smoking or non?

There was a small family owned diner in my hometown that had been built in like the 60s and never changed management. As such, they were one of the last businesses to still have a valid smoking permit. I distinctly remember the smell that permeated the walls, the chairs, the tables. Not unpleasant, necessarily, but distinct.

They eventually went out of business about a decade ago and got torn down and replaced with... a parking lot. With them went the last "smoking section" I've ever seen. If you want to smoke at a restaurant, you're eating on the patio.

I worked at a Lebanese reception centre in the 90s before smoking was banned inside in Victoria (Australia). By the end of the night, there was a clear horizontal delineation of where the fresh air stopped and where the cigar smoke started.

Also, I remember ash trays every few metres or so in our local Target - mind blowing these days that you were allowed to walk around and essentially vandalise clothing and other wares with tar.

One other memory... there's an interview of someone from The Prodigy coming to Melbourne after the indoor smoking ban, and they were mind blown that when playing in a nightclub, there was zero cigarette smoke but instead the smell of baby powder

I should have explained the baby powder - it helped when doing the Melbourne Shuffle

I recall those days. I also recall hanging my head out the side of the car when riding with my grandmother to avoid smelling the smoke.

I couldn’t imagine what planes would be like these days with smoking/non.

Only the obvious visible things have changed so that the masses have nothing to cry about.

Smoking around the local hospital is forbidden for a few years now, for everyone. However, if you look closely, you can easily see the spotts where the nurses still flock together to get some relief from the stress put on them. Officially not allowed, but everyone accepts the facts and lets the nurses cool down when they need to.

I am glad I life here, its slowly going nuts, but still has some sense left.

Switzerland still has a strong tobacco lobby, and while it varies from kanton to kanton, there are still full smoking bars, usually not allowed to be above a certain size limit, then there's rules for larger bars, where maybe they have a fumoire, or non smoking areas must be accessible without having to go through smoking areas.

If I'm honest, the smoking bars tend to be either awful, or very cool, there's still something about a hazy atmosphere, usually dark with good music and the right mix of people, I still find a lot of newer bars rather sterile and bland.

Still quite normal in bars and clubs in Berlin and likely other parts of Europe. Technically it’s not allowed but isn’t enforced and no one really cares. I don’t mind that as a non-smoker but would find it pretty awful in a restaurant or cafe.

In France in the 80s and 90s there was no such thing as a non-smoking section in restaurants. You could smoke anywhere, everywhere, anytime, all of the time.

In high school our teachers would smoke, not in class but in the corridor leading to the classroom, and they would drop their cigarette buts on the door sill.

People would smoke in cars continuously, including my parents when we were toddlers. It was forbidden to smoke in elevators but people found that outrageous and absurd and often disregarded that rule.

McDonalds had aluminium ashtrays that I collected (stole) because they were so convenient. Here's an image of one:

https://i.ebayimg.com/thumbs/images/g/m3sAAOSwqEZjlkoe/s-l30...

My primary school teacher chain-smoked in class. (She did later die of lung cancer while we were still school age.)

Wow. Where and when was this?

Poorer part of the UK in the 1980s.

I had a music teacher whose lessons consisted of his dictating to us from the back of an LP sleeve whilst smoking a pipe. Bizarrely, I remember rather a lot of his lessons.

> In high school our teachers would smoke

When I was in elementary school in the 80's, there was a designated smoking area for students, but I think you had to be in 7th grade or above to be allowed to use it, i.e. it was seen as ok for 13-year-olds to smoke.

Unfortunately, restaurants and bars still have "smoking or non" in Serbia, and in practice it's just smoking everywhere. So if you're hit with nostalgia and wish to smell like ashtray after going out - come to Serbia!

There is one small negative of banishing smoking in the rest of the world is dissapearance of ashtrays from modern cars. You don't have to smoke but it's convenient to have some kind of small trashcan for other purposes. Yes, you can buy third party one for a cupholder, but it's typically cheap and not nearly the OEM quality.

I did a road trip that passed through Serbia a few years ago and we couldn’t find any restaurant that wasn’t full of smoke besides McDonald’s so we just skipped eating meals until we got to a neighboring country that didn’t have this problem.

One of my first "real" jobs in the world, I was a bag boy at a grocery store. At the end of the night my job was to empty the ash trays that were at the end of every aisle, and to pick up the cigarette butts that people would put out on the floor. In the grocery store.

I also used to go to our local state fair as a pre-teen, and they would hand out free samples of Marlboro, Winston, Skoal and Copenhagen products to us. We were probably only 10 years old. They would give kids tobacco products.

We also smoked at school and the teachers would bum smokes off of us, and likewise we'd bum smokes off the teachers.

Crazy times.

Cinemas as well - I remember in the mid-late 70s the smoking section of the local cinema was to the left and in front of where my family usually sat. As the film progressed we could see the smoke drifting up into the lights of the projector.

As a kid, my first trip to Disney World happened in April of 1986. I only have fleeting memories of that trip, but two stand out: 1) Chernobyl on the headlines of papers in Florida and 2) how the smoke-filled cabin of the airplane stuffed me up to the point of being barely able to breathe.

I remember going to the hardware store when I was 8 to buy my dad a pouch of pipe tobacco. It was on a rack right next to the register, where today we see candy. The clerk didn't even think twice about me purchasing it.

i remember my dad would ask that our non-smoking family of four was seated in the restaurant smoking section (if it's the same room), as we would be taking seats away from the smokers and reduce the smoke in the room.

> I remember coming home from bars reeking of smoke

Unfortunately, that's still common in Germany, most notably in Berlin.

> You would go to a restaurant and the first thing your hostess would ask is "smoking or non"?

This was still a thing in Russia around 10 years ago until it became illegal to smoke pretty much anywhere public (tobacco advertising was also completely banned and cigarettes can now only be sold from a grey cabinet with a price list on it). I don't know how it worked in other parts of the world, but here, this separation between smoking and non-smoking areas in restaurants was very much notional. The non-smoking area would lack ashtrays on the tables, but it still smelled quite a lot.

Some bars and restaurants serve hookahs inside, to this day. These were never made illegal.

Even twenty years ago, if you went to a bar, you couldn't wear the same jeans to work the next day, because they reeked of smoke.

My city passed an indoor public smoking ban in 2005. At first, when I got a little bit drunk, I'd get nostalgic for the smell of cigarettes. The majority of people didn't smoke, including my friends, but before the ban, you couldn't be in a bar and not be surrounded by the smell of cigarettes. I missed it a little bit.

That nostalgia was outweighed by the benefit of not having a pile of nauseatingly smelly clothes the next day.

>That nostalgia was outweighed by the benefit of not having a pile of nauseatingly smelly clothes the next day.

That was a nightmare for wool sweaters and jackets, which absorb the smell well and aren't cheap to clean.

I started drinking after being pressured by a crazy Czech roommate years ago. I also started smoking cigs and weed at the same time.

I was in Vegas a few weeks ago, and being able to smoke at the bar was probably my favorite part. Not because I think it's a good thing, but just for the pure nostalgia.

I am currently in Serbia. It is not a part of EU, so there is no smoke ban at all (neigbour Bulgaria is EU and has at least some restrictions). There are no such things that "smoke or non", the whole venue is usually smoking. There are some places with zoning (usually those that has children in mind) and very rare ones totally non-smoking (expats are keeping a registry of those on Google Maps). It is quite shocking and makes me doubt libertarian ideas.

The plummeting rates of smoking in the US is one of the rare areas where this country really shines when it comes to social welfare. Even many European states that have what I'd consider much more progressive social welfare systems have smoking rates that are appalling, often 3x or more the US rates.

Too bad opioid addiction and deaths are way up.

On the other hand, being constantly ostracised from public spaces isn’t great either… something I find infuriating when I travel abroad. If there were at least a few smoking bars where you don’t have to go out into the cold to smoke I think that would be nice.

Eugh, god, no. It isnt ostracism if you are being asked to go outside because you want to light something on fire.

That being said you arent alone in this desire. The work around appears to be clubs with a membership fee and volunteer bartenders (at least where I live). If its something that pops up for you frequently then it might be worthwhile to pursue.

When all bars allowed smoking, all bars were the same. Then there came a govt ban on smoking in bars. So all bars are the same. (they all wailed loudly, but because it applied equally clientele had nowhere else to go.)

As a non smoker there are now options to go out I never had before. Restaurants are now safe again. (well except for parents who think it's OK for a child to be on a phone playing games at full audio volume, but we'll save that rant for another day.)

> On the other hand, being constantly ostracised from public spaces isn’t great either… something I find infuriating when I travel abroad. If there were at least a few smoking bars where you don’t have to go out into the cold to smoke I think that would be nice.

I'm a smoker, and I absolutely don't want smoking allowed in public indoor places, and some outdoor public places as well. I don't smoke indoors even in my own home.

On the other hand, when I duck down an empty alley and light up, I'm going to be annoyed if someone walking on the main road comes in to complain about how my second-hand smoke is going to give them cancer.

Too many times I have had people go out of their way to inhale my second hand smoke, and then complain about it.

> Too many times I have had people go out of their way to inhale my second hand smoke, and then complain about it.

Too many times I have had people go out of their way to walk in front of my 3 ton truck driving 100 mph in a pedestrian zone to almost get hit, and then complain about it.

> Too many times I have had people go out of their way to walk in front of my 3 ton truck driving 100 mph in a pedestrian zone to almost get hit, and then complain about it.

Maybe you shouldn't be doing 100mph around other people.

Sure, if you stop smoking around other people ;-)

> Sure, if you stop smoking around other people ;-)

Maybe english is not your first language, but you did read what I wrote, right? You did read my post saying that I get annoyed at people who go up to lone smokers and then complain?

You know what that means, right? It literally means "I don't smoke around other people!"

I'm afraid I am unable to simplify it any further.

My point is if you are the user/owner of a device capable of killing (huge car, cigarettes) there’s a big responsibility on you to prevent harm on others.

There’s always a grey area, but generally I’d say in a public space it’s the smoker who should actively move to avoid non-smokers.

What great hyperbole. This is possibly the strongest hyperbole in the _history of the universe!_

If you’re allowed to smoke in the bar then I’m allowed to bring my bucket of rotten fish.

All health issues aside, it’s just disgusting. It smells awful, it makes everything else smell awful. I always hate ending up in an elevator with a smoker, it’s nauseating. It truly is a disgusting habit.

That's probably due to insurance companies charging huge amounts more health insurance for smokers.

The smoking rate in Canada is far lower than the United States, despite having universal healthcare. I think it's more cultural than financially driven (though aggressive taxation of tobacco could be a factor if that's a thing in the US, too).

Sources I can find suggest that Canada and the US are comparable (10% CA, 12% US). Your point is still valid that it's culture.

You both could be right.

Especially in places like NYC, cigs are very expensive.

Well, legal cigs. There is a healthy black market in NYC.

IIRC the difference when applying for insurance on the healthcare marketplace for 2023 was like $5/month (out of $700 total - so less than 1% more).

My employer plan charges $500/yr

That’s probably an exception. My understanding is that usually insurance companies charge MUCH more if you smoke.

Was trying to find out when it even became legal for insurers to even have a tobacco surcharge. That speaks to the power of the tobacco lobby.

I believe (iirc) that legality is quite recent (possibly from the ACA), but I'm pretty sure that is news within the last 20 years.

In that search, I spotted a study that stated the surcharge does not increase cessation but does decrease uptake. Which makes sense, tobacco has a higher relapse rate at 6 months than compared to relapse rates for cocaine or heroin.

High cig prices have a similar effect for youth smoking. Smoking is an infamous example of inelastic demand (that and gasoline were _the_ examples used when I was taught elastic vs in-elastic demand in grade school)

Me and my buddies would hang out with travelling Europeans at local hostels in the US, but are like "eh but then we'd have to hang out with smokers"

I worked for a big MNC a few years back with big offices in Europe.

We’d meet for senior leader meetings and it was pretty stark. None of the US people smoked and 80% of the Europeans did (small sample).

When a European VP had her birthday we joked and asked her if her colleagues bought her a carton of smokes.

Yeah it’s really quite something. I end up having to increase my dosage on asthma meds for a week or two every time I go to Europe. Some of the cooler places to go are sadly a bit smokier than I like.

That may also be due to the heavy use of diesel cars in Europe and their higher emissions of nitrates and sulfates. It is very noticeable when walking along a busy avenue in Sweden compared the USA.

It's definitely from going into smoky bars, though I doubt the diesel helps.

If only BigSugar could have a day in court like BigTobacco. Sugar addiction is the next big social health care type of thing I'd like to see recognized. Yes, opiates are bad right now, but I don't think anyone would have ever denied it out side of the people making/selling. Great majority people do not even recognize sugar as a problem.

no one is getting stage 4 lung cancer from sugar. Or having their jaw removed due to mouth cancer . Or hooked up to one of those oxygen machines due to irreversible lung damage. Sure, there are risks with obesity, not not as lethal or causal as with tobacco products. Fats are also a major contributor too, like steak.

It’s addictive and leads to obesity. Obesity is a leading cause of cancer.

There doesn’t seem to be any relationship between dietary fat and cancer.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12566141/

There is a huge relationship between obesity and cancer.

You disregard diabetes rather lightly there. Diabetes can result in amputations, blindness, heart attacks, strokes and other fun things.

Sure there are other food choices that lead to obesity, but sugar is certainly high on the list.

One thing in common though is that telling a smoker to "just quit" is about the same as telling someone who likes sugar to "just stop". Personally I'm working to "reduce my intake", slowly but surely.

Edit:but for sure there's no such thing as second-hand-sugar and that a Huge difference between the two.

> there's no such thing as second-hand-sugar

Which makes this a truly personal choice.

“Smoking is a choice, don’t ban it” always irks me because it’s a choice smokers make for themselves and everyone else in a 30m radius around them from forcing others to breathe in their polluted air.

> there's no such thing as second-hand-sugar

But there absolutely is such a thing as a "food desert"

    an urban area in which it is difficult to buy affordable or good-quality fresh food.

particularly within the USofA, places where lack of finnacial resources across communities, lack of affordable public transport, and lack of shopping options essentially doom large groups of people to low grade high sugar foods.

Good governments that are orientated toward the well being of their citizens population tend to enact limits on sugar in food, improve transport, subsidize good food etc.

Often with the evil socialist goal of better health, improved job options via transport, reduced universal health costs, and more taxpayers ..

I still see this idea brought up but it feels like the tide has turned against the idea of "food deserts" with a lot of studies undermining it, and worth looking into if you're interested.

The raw data still appears to suport the notion:

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-environment-atla...

and the various initiatives started to address the issue haven't yet had time to make significant changes in enough of the areas worst off:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/apr/29/us-food-...

It's a good start, with a way to go:

> On Sept. 28, the White House is hosted a conference on hunger, nutrition and health — the second conference of its kind in five decades — and introduced a 40-page national strategy as a roadmap toward the goal of ending hunger and increasing healthy eating by 2030.

https://journalistsresource.org/home/food-insecurity-health/

> Edit:but for sure there's no such thing as second-hand-sugar and that a Huge difference between the two.

Obesity can cause epigenetic changes that are passed down to offspring.

True, and a person's diet choices can absolutely impact others. From a parents choice of what to feed their children to a school's selling out of all health for cheap corporate shit meals, even down to a road trip participants insistence on specific eating location. We are not always perfectly in control of our eating choices. Sure in a perfect world we'd all have the time and space and money to carry our own food but as someone who grew up with crohns' disease I think people strongly underestimate how make situations reduce eating choice to only cheap, bad, sugar filled processed foods. Every pizza or ice cream party (of which my school had many), every birthday, every sleep over, every time my brother cried about wanting to eat out. Forcing yourself to eat natural healthy food in America often involves the choice to not eat.

Consumption of sugar increases rates of cancer and all-cause mortality. This study[1] found that only 5g/day increases in sugar consumption raised rates of cancer.

> Or having their jaw removed due to mouth cancer . Or hooked up to one of those oxygen machines due to irreversible lung damage.

There are plenty of people who lost extremities and/or their sight due to diabetes. They'll be hooked up to insulin pumps, or they'll need regular insulin injections or they'll die. Others can get cancer, as well. Some might need machines just to move around, or will need serious surgeries to keep themselves from eating to death.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026156142...

Fat is such a complex topic it would be hard to spend enough time refuting the last statement. But, in short it depends on what kind of fat (body fat? (if you're in a catabolic state, you will be "eating" your own fat; and this too has different types, depending on what your diet was!),trans,polyunsaturated,saturated,mono), how active you are, how much you consume, whether you're in ketosis/adapted, as well as a host of genetic factors,which determine your lipase production. Mostly agree on the "like steak" part, though that too would take a long time to, umm, break down.

It's really tough to become obese by eating steak, even if it has a high fat content. You just can't physically stuff yourself with that much meat. Carbohydrates, especially simple sugars, are absolutely the main culprit behind the obesity epidemic.

There may be other problems with certain fats. In particular there is growing evidence that highly processed seed oils are problematic, although that hasn't been definitively proven yet.

For 20 years we’ve been eating fewer carbs and getting fatter (on average)

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0OuoFyJtZuI/VkofY-qgeOI/AAAAAAAAbb...

I don't think your data is accurate. Where did that chart come from? And not all carbs are created equal. From an obesity perspective, 100 kcal of sugar in soda pop appears to be far worse than the same amount of sugar in fruit.

https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/nqab270

Mostly likely here: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p...

It would be interesting to see massive warnings about sugar related illnesses on packaging.

Smoking risks is one of the few thing in which it cannot be overstated. Unlike other forms of safety-ism.

Smoking tobacco, as far as I know, does not make one spontaneously explode.

To say otherwise, in my view, would be overstating the risks of smoking.

I can't remember where I read that, but someone had made an interesting observation that stayed with me, and your comment makes me think of it (perhaps you're referring to the same article?)

What if instead of slowly dying of cancer, smoking had a tiny tiny chance of making you die by exploding your face? Exact same probability of dying, just very violent and graphic.

Chances are barely anyone would smoke. Yet, same death rate.

To answer your point, I think smoking is worse than making your head explode, it has a much greater societal cost in healthcare than if you were to die there and then, and creates much more suffering.

Not because of how violent and graphic, but because there's a chance the death is immediate. Cancer is always a long, long time away.

It's like saying if you put $100 in your 401k every month, there's a chance (equal to the number of new retirees) you instantly get $2M dollars.

Many more people would understand the immediate gain instead of the 30 year slog.

Funny, I had the exact same thought over Covid death rates during the early pandemic. People would have been a lot less skeptical of the precautions if your head exploded immediately after catching it (assuming you were part of the ~1% that were destined to die from the symptoms eventually).

Fewer would smoke, but I'd wager it would be popular with the young. I think it all boils down to feedback. The more abstract something is, the harder it is to fathom. So if you lessen the feedback, by, for example, delaying the negative effects, people won't react. Take the other popular vice, alcohol. If hangover was immediately present, I don't think we would have the drinking culture that we have today. How many vow to never drink again, on the day after. Yet, people drink again.

If you’re around something explosive you might!

Smoking is thought to be one of the leading causes of spontaneous human combustion.

> Even many European states that have what I'd consider much more progressive social welfare systems have smoking rates that are appalling, often 3x or more the US rates.

Which countries are those? I ask because it would be nice to compare the incidence of the top smoking-related diseases between the countries.

France is a smokers country for instance.

France is an interesting comparison. As I understand it, smoking is highly class correlated in the US, but much less so in France.

I have a PhD and studied for a time at one of France's premier universities: my advisor smoked, and one graduate student in his lab smoked. All told, probably 10-20% incidence. In America I've worked with or around close to 100 physicists, and only one of them was a smoker.

That may explain something.

The other day I watched a French movie - "Other peoples' children". I had to check and re-check and check again if this was an old movie re-launched or something. In the movie the actors all started smoking at private dinners (with, in this case, a small child living in the house), women with cigarettes held vertically in that stupid-looking way, like in an old fifties tobacco ad. I couldn't understand why that was made part of a movie which was supposed to be "slice of life". It looked completely wrong. I can't imagine people smoking inside houses now, none of the people I know who still smoke will actually smoke inside. None. And everyone just grabbing a cigarette inside that living room? I think I even saw a cigarette scene inside a restaurant too.

No one in my family smokes but my childhood best friend's mom smoked a lot inside their apartment (not a very big space), and I spent so much time over there. It was sad, they always had a smell about them because of this. They were indoor kids and I spent years of my youth at their place playing video games and D&D. I didn't know any better as a kid but I think back on it and wonder how much that affected my lungs. I stopped going over so much around my senior year of highschool (mid-90s) and then eventually lost touch in the late 90s because our lives went in different directions so my lungs have probably recovered a lot from whatever damage that did. Now I hate the smell of cigarette smoke and can smell it from a good distance away.

IMO this is because France was reluctant to increase the price of tobacco. I remember going to NYC in 2010 and a packet of cigarettes was 15$, nearly 3 times what I used to pay in France. Now they’ve set tobacco prices increase in motion, I expect the number of smokers to drop significantly. In the UK where tobacco prices have been on par with the US, I notice much fewer smokers than in France, and most of them seem to be foreigners

I believe around 20% of respondents in the Netherlands said they smoked in 2020.

For the same period, Iceland though was close to the US, with a reported rate of 12% of respondents saying they smoked.

> said they smoked

"Smoked cigarettes right? :D"

Netherlands: stares in Dutch

"Smoked cigarettes right? :o"

Austria

Yeah Austrian restaurants were an absolute shocker for me. There are so many places where the 'non-smoking area' absolute reeks of second hand smoke.

Coming out from a night out with your clothes smelling like cigarettes felt like going back 30 years in time.

I'm not sure when you have been there last. The smoking ban passed a few years already, I haven't smelled cigarette smoke inside in a long time. Patios on the other hand is a different story altogether where sadly smoking is still allowed.

Indeed I now realize it may not be very up to date. I was there pre pandemic perhaps this is now changed as you say.

Most of Eastern and Southern Europe, for sure. Whenever I visit and go to a bar I have a mild shock at the smoke everywhere.

> The plummeting rates of smoking in the US

Do you consider vaping in this statistics? I can't find a definite answer.

Amazing that I scrolled this far to see any mention of vaping. I don't believe the stat can include vaping - it's anecdotal, but nearly 100% of the amigas I know vape. No amigos however, strangely enough. I think it's an anxiety thing. No amigos or amigas that smoke cigarettes habitually though.

I still see more cigarettes than vapes at bars, but the gap is closing. The annoying part is people seem to think they can vape indoors at the bar, whereas 95% will go to the covered patio to smoke. So vapes are more likely to get into your lungs second hand, and their long term effect on your lungs is entirely unknown. Hooray!

In The Netherlands it's embarrassing. They basically had to beg supermarkets to stop selling cigarettes and then give them a years long transition period.

It could be very easy. Ban the sales of tobacco to everyone born after "YYYY", make cigarettes cost €50 per pack, make smoking when not allowed a €100 fine, deposit all tax from tobacco sales into a national program where people get free "exercise credits" to be redeemed at fitness studios etc.

At €50 per pack people would buy them on the black market.

It definitely was something that surprised me when I moved here. Even among young people, it seems to be fairly popular.

Could another option be a higher `Eigen Risico` for smokers? I don't know if that could even be enforced.

> Ban the sales of tobacco to everyone born after "YYYY"

This is what New Zealand just did: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/13/new-zealand-pa...

Is it really that bad a thing though? Nicotine has several benefits even if smoking may not. There was a recent HN discussion on how current higher levels of adult ADHD may be because of the decrease in smoking. I am a very occasional smoker, maybe I smoke around a pack a year. I dont see any particular problems at my level of smoking. You might inhale a far higher level of carcinogens simply driving to work or hanging around a parking lot.

Smoking is divine. Eh, sorry, I mean Cigarettes are Sublime

https://www.dukeupress.edu/cigarettes-are-sublime

Ashtrays may go along into the dark arts of secret knowledge, along with hooking up a modem, coding your own BBS, repairing your own leather boots, starting a fire to cook dinner over, etc. But something human, something tactile, something that carries with it dangers and pleasures and the competence to determine your own safety, gets lost each time we're proud that the next generation doesn't have to think about these things and can't even conceive of them. I don't really think it's human advancement to throw out the bad things if it means forgetting what they are and why they were bad; then we're doomed to repeat our mistakes. Cigarettes are unquestionably a net negative, but if you haven't understood the pleasure and beauty of them, you can't really understand what makes them tempting. Just like you can't understand what makes religion tempting if you're an atheist, or what makes sex tempting if you're asexual. Yet these things we look down on are all parts of the human experience, and if all you do is look down on things that you never partook of, you really aren't well-qualified to decide whether they had merit.

It would be a lot easier to agree with you if the tobacco companies hadn't spent decades of time and millions of dollars trying to gaslight the world about the consequences of smoking, aiming advertising at children, and generally making comic-book villains of themselves. Unfortunately they fought so uncompromisingly to avoid having to cede even the slightest of their market that they made complete ostracization the only feasible path forward for public policymakers. Nearly half of adult America smoked in the 1960s; ten years ago that number was at 20%, and today that number is below 13% and dropping -- and unlike the drinking age, smoking wasn't used as a bludgeon by the federal government for forcing its will on the states. It's pure PR and a little urban taxation.

It's fine - this is not in defense of RJR or something. I truly love to smoke. I love to smoke a pipe, to feel the sting of the smoke and the richness and then take a glass of wine next to it, taste the leather and dried fruit interacting with the bittersweet tobacco. I love to roll cigarettes, the act of doing so for others and for myself, delaying the intense pleasure of the flick of the lighter and the sound of the burning leaves. I love a cigar, the method of it, the intensity of its flavor next to a glass of rye whisky, turning both into chocolate and raspberries, the sheer pleasure of each wave of smoke entering your mouth.

I'm not defending tobacco companies. I just fuckin love tobacco. Dig?

[edit] I did not steal these lines from "Cigarettes are Sublime" - they're my own personal feelings. I can't seem to find my copy of that book.

I truly love to ride a motorcycle.

No ignorance on it’s order-of-magnitude lethality multiplier over cars. But there is a certain cognitive-adrenaline fused pleasure that comes with seamlessly gliding your way through the perfect Bézier-esque curve over a gentle highway turn, whilst being held in the ever-present protective arms of gyroscopic precession, that makes the danger of it all worth it to me.

Rollercoasters let you experience a far greater degree of adrenaline and wind rushing through you, but don’t come close to this particular feeling of smiling at death.

The nicotine high is a very pleasant headspace. I only smoked occasionally in college and grad school for a few years and off-and-on afterword socially for a few more years but I miss the scintillating conversations and the headspace nicotine put you in. More pronounced than caffeine but not so stimulating as a stronger stimulant. Some of my most interesting conversations happened over a cigarette.

AFAICT nicotine is the lesser evil. It's addictve, and somehow toxic, but not hugely.

What makes cigarettes so vile is the actual smoke. The tars, the CO, the nitrous mess that's needed to keep the cigarette from extinguishing. The filter helps, but not a lot. A cigarette without any nicotine would still damage health a lot.

Fortunately, the addicts, and those who want the nicotine high, have the option of vaping now, which is close in the sense of the ritual required, but is much less detrimental to health.

Nicotine isn't a particularly difficult addiction in the grand scheme of things. It takes most people only a week or two to overcome nicotine addiction. Alcohol and opiates are on a different level. Cigarettes, on the other hand, are extremely addictive. There's something about putting a little stick in your mouth, inhaling, tasting it, then exhaling a cloud of smoke/vapour. I was given a nicotine-free disposable e-cigarette and was quite alarmed at how quickly I became addicted to it.

And possibly the fact that cigarette companies freebase the nicotine by soaking the tobacco in ammonia.

I switched to rolling my own smokes with hemp paper and filters almost 20 years ago. I can't stand the taste or smell of chemicals from packaged cigarettes (even the "organic" ones that still have all kinds of accelerants and flame retardants in the paper). A single Marlboro will give me a headache the next day.

It's actually just really sad that smokers have been force-fed that deadly shit, because while the poster above is correct that nicotine itself is not harmful and it's mainly the burn products of the tobacco leaf that are carcinogenic, they don't need to be nearly as deadly as they are in modern packed cigarettes. Some of the additives are mandated by the government (such as the wood glue that's now used in all commercial rolled cigarette papers as a "fire safe" stopper halfway) and those are as bad or worse than the arsenic and other additives the tobacco companies came up with.

On the other hand, roll-your-own (RYO) tobacco, especially the type labeled organic, has its own issues. One of them is that "organic" tobacco actually has a higher level of Polonium (which is taken up and concentrated by all tobacco plants, where it's present in the fertilizer - but organic fertilizers have higher levels of Polonium). Of all the thousands of compounds you inhale when you smoke a cigarette, that's probably the one that's most likely to cause lung cancer.

And yet smoking is so fucking delicious. The commenter above who talked about conversations in college over a cigarette -- that's my life. Every night. Having to step outside the cafe hasn't killed it, that social ferment, although I think that was the intention when they banned smoking inside. If anything, it's heightened the interaction after an entire generation was forced into these ghettos. If only 11% of Americans smoke (which cannot possibly be true -- that's an absolute lie, as at least 70% of people I can think of in Portland from 30 to 60 smoke cigarettes and Portland is not exactly Mississippi) they're definitely the most interesting 11%, and highly concentrated now.

Wtf did I just read

You just read some extremely refined copium in text form.

This person has some major cognitive dissonance about the health and safety of smoking cigarettes and is dissociating from the dissonance with poetic drivel.

Tobacco is unhealthy to consume. It's okay in small, occasional doses, your body can probably shrug off a few draws from a ceremonial peace pipe like it was nothing.

But smoking every day or multiple times a day is unhealthy and will hasten your demise, and there is no working around that, not even by using organic free range gluten free fair trade halal tobacco grown by vestal virgins in the Himalayas.

Don't be silly. Is your home's air filtered correctly? Did you scratch your face after touching a public doorknob? I hope you're not using "poetic drivel" to justify use of a gas stove when we know it leads to combustion byproducts in the air. You better be eating healthy all the time too, or else only copium is justifying your food choices.

Nobody is saying that cigarettes or nicotine is healthy. The warnings exist and are highly popular. Smoking bans in public places in the many US states are generally very popular in those states. The "poetic" poster talked about how cigarettes are bad multiple times. But as adults with full knowledge of the risks of something, these adults can still engage in these activities in ways that are not posing risks to other. That's what it means to be an adult.

The moral panic around secondhand smoke is what bothers a lot of smokers. Having smoked in the past I will often join smokers to outdoor areas where they smoke just to chat without partaking and the restrictions are often really difficult to work around so I understand where the opinion comes from, even though I'm a fan of the restrictions generally.

The dangers of smoking are not equatable to the dangers of unfiltered house air.

Smoking is a known carcinogen with a known increase in death rate on top of all of the things you listed. In fact smokers probably also have the exact same air quality and environmental dangers that you listed but have added smoking on top of that.

Sure, have fun, it's your life. Smoke away. Just don't believe lies about "organic tobacco" being healthy for you. It's not.

I don't think anyone believes any lies about "organic tobacco" being healthy for you. Cigarettes and combustion are bad for you. It's obvious and the labels and taxes enforce this so that future generations understand what they're getting into with tobacco products. I don't smoke myself and it's because I'm aware of the risks of what's happening.

Offering snark at someone else's conscious bad habit that affects nobody but themselves and other smokers who opt-in strikes me as silly. Smoking has been successfully regulated, though minor vigilance is required to make sure tobacco companies don't try and undo regulation. There are many worse things that Americans partake in all the time that are untaxed, unlabelled, and only minorly regulated that will have much better public health outcomes than continually shining a spotlight on smoking and will be a better use of our collective moral and political capital as a country.

So, you think my responses are simply about how smoking is bad?

Oral fixations are tough for some of us. A former coworker and I found ourselves utterly addicted to chewing gum after our office began offering gum as a free perk. I've cut it out of my life because I found myself going through a pack of gum in a day. No nicotine at all, just regular chewing gum.

It's not just the smoke. Otherwise chewing tobacco and inhaling it wouldn't cause cancers for the mouth and nose.

I inherited from my dad an ashtray made from the end if a three inch artillery shell. As an ensign in the US Navy in 1960, he had a machinists mate make one for him by cutting the end of the shell down and then welding bent pennies onto it for the cigarette holder portion.

My favorite detail was that it was stamped 1944 on the bottom.

“But dad, you were in the Navy in the 1960’s?”

“They made a LOT of shells in 1944”

On a morbid note, they made so many Purple Hearts for the planned invasion of Japan in 1945 that they haven’t needed to make more since.

I don't see how that's morbid. They thought a lot more people would be injured or killed than actually were. Isn't that the opposite of morbid?

I think what's implied to be morbid isn't the fact that they haven't made them since, it's them making so many in the first place

Not exactly true, more were made in 1976, in 2000, and in 2008.

What is true is they still have a fair few left over ready to issue from WWII .. they misplaced 125,000 from that time and rediscovered them in that enormous Raiders of the Lost Ark warehouse.

See:

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/176762

They belong in a museum!

> Everyone had hard-smoking relatives who looked like absolute hell by their late 30s, were coughing up a lung in their 40s, and by their 50s were being hoisted by pallbearers.

Smoking is a disgusting habit and I love working from home because I never have to step in an elevator with folks fresh from a smoke break, but it isn't nearly that fatal.

I grew up when smoking was literally everywhere and the "hard-smoking" folks overwhelmingly survived to their 60s and most to their 70s or later. A 55 year old smoking death was rare.

Exaggeration destroys trust.

But there are plenty of documented cases where heavy smoking for around 30 years = cancer.

I have to wonder if cigarettes of the 50s are different from the cigarettes of today. Perhaps, for example, some additive(s) not present in the 50s cigs are causing cancer in today’s cigs.

Also, “hard-smoking” is subjective. Are the heavy smokers of today smoking more than the heavy smokers of the 50s?

Speaking anecdotally, all four of my grandparents smoked, all four died north of age 70, and all four died in very unpleasant, smoking-related ways (essentially suffocation, all four- COVID, COPD, pneumonia, and I’m not sure about the fourth). So I guess my final point is: is it really a “win” if smokers “usually” make it to old age?

I know some cigarette companies put asbestos in the filter to keep the cotton fibers of other brands out of your lungs.

That might have had some unintended side effects...

A cursory Google search says it was one company and only until 1956, but that's a neat fact. It's like when kids would get their limbs X-Rayed at the grocery store for funsies.

Yeah... I didn't. My grandfather smoked until his 70s before quitting and my great grandfather was still smoking a couple of Keep Moving cigars a day until he died in his mid 80s. All of my aunts and uncles on my mom's side are in their 60s and 70s and still smoke. Hell, nothing brings me back to my childhood like the whiff of a freshly lit cigarette. I still remember being a very young boy back in the 70s and smelling the cigarette smoke at night in the rain at my great grandfather's fishing camp at Grand Isle, Louisiana as the adults played cards and listened to the radio.

I love the smell of a cigarette when it’s first lit. If they packed them well, it’s just the scent of the paper with a hint of tobacco. It’s a great smell for about a second, then it turns to the smell we all hate. But I miss the scent of a my parents’ and grandparents’ cigarettes, or maybe I just miss all the people who’ve died.

My father stopped smoking in the car when little me brightly piped up from the back seat after he lit up "Mmm, I love that smell when you first light a cigarette, Dad!". I still like that smell - for all of its second's existence!

My strongest Grand Isle memories are running along the beach at night with a spotlight, chasing countless tiny crabs. I wonder how many of us here have fond memories from a Grand Isle fishing camp. Maybe just the two of us!

But 55 year olds died all the time from smoking: heart attacks and strokes are smoking deaths too

Are you sure? Heart attacks and strokes main outcome of smoking, not lungs diseases?

Smoking (also) causes cardiovascular disease - Atherosclerosis, increased blood pressure, increased cholesterol, etc.

1 in 3 deaths from cardiovascular disease are estimated to be caused by smoking.

Smoking damages your body in all sorts of ways, one just rolls the dice on which one gets them first.

You said main outcome, not me. Cardiovascular stuff is really common, but it's a less common association: "breathing smoke makes lungs get sick" is easy to believe. "breathing smoke makes brain leak" takes a little more knowledge.

If you still have doubts, consider the prevalence of vaping. Sure vaping is healthier than smoking, but it's way way worse than not using nicotine in any form.

Tobacco smoking has pretty much disappeared —unfortunately some people believe smoke from marijuana is less dangerous to lungs and don’t affect other aspects of cognition… so it has an non disapproving audience.

That said… while ashtrays have disappeared, the electric cigarette lighter lives on in most cars if only as a way to get juice out of the car to run appliances of off.

Marijuana is less dangerous to lungs than tobacco.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1277837/

> Tobacco has dramatic negative consequences for those who smoke it. In addition to its high addiction potential [1], tobacco is causally associated with over 400,000 deaths yearly in the United States, and has a significant negative effect on health in general [2]. More specifically, over 140,000 lung-related deaths in 2001 were attributed to tobacco smoke [3]. Comparable consequences would naturally be expected from cannabis smoking since the burning of plant material in the form of cigarettes generates a large variety of compounds that possess numerous biological activities [4].

> While cannabis smoke has been implicated in respiratory dysfunction, including the conversion of respiratory cells to what appears to be a pre-cancerous state [5], it has not been causally linked with tobacco related cancers [6] such as lung, colon or rectal cancers. Recently, Hashibe et al [7] carried out an epidemiological analysis of marijuana smoking and cancer. A connection between marijuana smoking and lung or colorectal cancer was not observed. These conclusions are reinforced by the recent work of Tashkin and coworkers [8] who were unable to demonstrate a cannabis smoke and lung cancer link, despite clearly demonstrating cannabis smoke-induced cellular damage.

> Furthermore, compounds found in cannabis have been shown to kill numerous cancer types including: lung cancer [9], breast and prostate [10], leukemia and lymphoma [11], glioma [12], skin cancer [13], and pheochromocytoma [14]. The effects of cannabinoids are complex and sometimes contradicting, often exhibiting biphasic responses. For example, in contrast to the tumor killing properties mentioned above, low doses of THC may stimulate the growth of lung cancer cells in vitro [15].

The effect is also stronger, lasts longer, and is less addictive than coffee. The average user isn't smoking a joint per hour like it was tobacco. Sure, it's definitely not healthy, but everyone does something that trades longevity for fun. :-)

Still, I'm not sure why someone would bother with the risks of smoking when edibles exist.

Edibles are a qualitatively different experience.

I like both. When I want a quick&easy buzz before sleep, a smoke or vape is the option. If I wanna get baked for a few hours and wake up feeling amazing, an edible it is.

Because I don't always want to write off my entire day.

Legality of sale of products of reliable quality is unevenly distributed

The SAGE consoles not only had an ashtray, but also an integrated lighter.

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SAGE_console.jpeg

I would probably want a smoke staring into that thing all day too.

That is rather incredible. "Let us put a tray for an intensely hot object on this security-crucial hardware, because people are so addicted to it".

Rather than choosing the alternative: let's take this opportunity to snub the customer and show that we know better than he does.

well, they knew most user would addicted to it (and would likely smoke while using them), so they chose to protect their hardware by providing a safe place to dump the ashes

About five years ago I was drowsy on jet flight with a cough drop wrapper. Reflexively I tried to throw the wrapper away in the arm rest and was momentarily confused that there wasn't an ashtray built into it.

Cars too had them and the utility power socket was initially for car cigarette lighter (which was just a piece of metal that got very hot when turned on)

Yeah it's funny we still talk about plugging into a cigarette lighter, even though they haven't come with actual cigarette lighters in them for quite some time (at least here in California).

I haven’t seen one in a new car in more than ten years. I do not live in CA, though, I live in the US. I think they just stopped adding them all together. Why spend an extra $0.01 per car (or whatever it really costs) when most people don’t need or want the lighter?

Unable to take off my lawyer hat, I assumed it was because of the risk of lawsuits from customers who accidentally burned themselves or started fires.

I know at least Ford sells a 'smoker package' option, where one of the power points is occupied by a cigarette lighter and they include an ash tray that fits in a cupholder... for like $300. Smoking isn't a cheap hobby, I guess.

I remember being on a long (9ish hour) flight from London to Nairobi as a child. My heavy-smoker parents thoughtfully bought non-smoking seats for the flight.

We turned out to be a row or two away, made no difference at all.

But, they both smoked heavily, continuously in the car and at home too. My whole family did. Grandparent, parents, siblings (2 of 6 didn’t), step parents, aunts and uncles. Growing up it felt much odder and rebellious to not smoke.

In addition to the ash trays my father insisted he use little heavy, silver tubular extinguishers in each ash tray. Silver plated, from memory. Doubt they did much, but were ubiquitous at home.

My father was proud when he “gave up smoking” by moving from Gitances to Silk Cut, which he said were like fresh air compared.

I remember being a kid on a flight with my dad and the people a row over from us glaring at him because he was smoking. Mind you, I was glaring at him too... so embarrassing and awkward.

Back in the late 80s I had a job servicing the 2 way radios used by bus drivers. Then you could smoke of buses & it caused a lot of problems not just for the passengers but for the electronics getting into volume controls , channel selector switches and that sort of thing. You would open up a radio and inside the contents had turned a yellowy brown colour , often it was impossible to make out the original colours of the wires. The trick was to put the entire radio circuit into a bath of luke warm water with washing up liquid. After 10 mins or so the nicotine residue would float up and form a yellow scum layer on top of the water. Quite disgusting.

My grandfather (who died because of his smoking addiction) had a number of ashtrays I distinctly remember. There was a push-down one that would spin, depositing the ashes and butts into a trap door compartment inside. There was one made of old coins bent and welded together. Of course simple glass ones around the house. The truck had an ash tray built in, with a lid mechanism so it could be removed and emptied without making a mess. Go to estate sales and you'll see them sometimes.

The statistics can be really surprising to people: "Only 40% of people smoked?" and "Wow, that many?" equally likely. Drinking alcohol is similar in that regard, people are amazed (for opposite reasons) to find out 60% of Americans drink.

> Drinking alcohol is similar in that regard, people are amazed (for opposite reasons) to find out 60% of Americans drink.

I'm technically in that 60%, but I drink so infrequently I barely qualify (outside of certain social events, I never drink, and never more than 2 drinks). I think I had about a dozen drinks in all of 2022.

I wonder what percent of that 60% are similar to me.

I'm in a similar boat. All of my friends are sober alcoholics (both coincidence and networking) and so aside from rare occasion with family, I don't drink alcohol and honestly don't enjoy the feeling anymore.

I doubt I average more than a drink a month. My extended family, however, might have several a week (glass of wine with dinner, or an after-dinner cocktail). Get far enough out into the countryside, and driving after drinking is, if not normal, then at least hardly frowned upon unless you're not able to walk straight.

More and more often, I find myself thinking that if there is a choice to be made, someone somewhere will take it.

60% isn't a startling figure. What is, is that 90% of the alcohol sold is consumed by 10%, most of whom are essentially functional alcoholics. 1 in 10 of the people you encounter daily.

Well it's better than being a dysfunctional alcholic I suppose.

Roughly half https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3i83rv/til_i...

I tell people that I don't not drink. The reality is I drink when I want but I almost never want. I am sure that people like me are part of that 60%.

Only 60% of Americans drink? I routinely get astonished looks when I tell people that I've never in my life even tried a drop of alcohol. It seems like way more than 60% have had alcohol.

When someone says that they drink, they usually either mean that they drink regularly or that they will drink again in the future. There are plenty of people who have consumed alcohol who never found much of a use for the stuff.

I would never say that I don't drink. So I wouldn't be part of the (in the case you refer to) 40%. But I almost never drink, and never very much anymore. Some years I've had maybe a couple of beers. I will take a little glass of wine a few times a year, at dinners. But I never feel the need to open a beer or drink wine at home. Had to dump most of my wine collection a while ago, the bottles were so old that when I checked, most of them had become vinegar. But if people ask if I don't drink alcohol I would never say "I don't". Because I do. I just don't have a wish to, most of the time.

Uggh, I remember ashtrays in the 70s the size of basketballs sliced in half below the equator. Full, every other day? Yellow walls and clouds in the living room. Don’t miss that shit one bit.

Last time I experienced it was a trip to Europe around 2005, multiple people smoking indoors at the next table without a concern in the world.

Nothing like when someone brought a PC into the shop to work on and it was from a smokers house. Made the whole place small like an ashtray, and the parts were sticky with tar.

Second-hand NES cartridges were notorious for that.

> I mean, even back in the 60s and 70s, everyone knew smoking would kill you. Sure, the science wasn’t fully in

The "British Doctors Study" [0] reported statistical proof as early as 1956 that smoking was significantly linked with Lung Cancer so by the time the 60s dawned the science was pretty clear cut.

The public health response in any country I know of lagged behind quite a way but by 1966 the US Surgeon General mandated warnings on cigarette packs [1] although unfortunately for the smokers of the USA they now lag behind most other countries in the vividness of the warning with the usual suspects doing their best to keep the poor and uninformed in ignorance of what they're being sold [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Doctors_Study

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_packaging_warning_mess...

[2] https://journalnow.com/business/local/cigarette-companies-wi...

So I used to smoke, and also smoked cannabis when I was younger. One thing that fascinates me is the new-found legality of pot in the US, and in particular some of the paraphernalia that's come along with it. I see that Seth Rogan has a company which sells really nicely designed ashtrays and things, and I find it kind of "nice" that companies are still designing and selling things like this, even though they seem like a relic of the past now.

I really miss ashtrays at restaurant and other public places, like the bus. When I'm sitting at a restaurant table and I want to get rid of my chewing gum (or any other small piece of trash), I can never find a place to put it. Growing up ashtrays were everywhere and you could always count on one being close by.

> When I'm sitting at a restaurant table and I want to get rid of my chewing gum (or any other small piece of trash)

That's what the underside of the table is for ;-)

A more meta thought about ashtrays - I just want to point out that we can do things if we want to.

In the last few years I have heard many young people depressed, lethargic, and only see doom and gloom because of some self-destructive behaviors. I want to remind them that there is not only possibility but likely probability that we can and will correct ourselves.

Think about when we started smoking cigarettes. I distinctly remember the yellow film on windows, the cigarette butts on the streets, the burn marks on arm rests, the thick smoke of restaurants. "Everyone" was smoking, and in a few decades it is now nearly wiped out. We corrected our mistake.

How awesome is that?

I hate to be that guy, but to me these two don't connect.

Yes we as a society corrected our mistake, but the transition from "Everyone smoking" to "Barely anyone smoking" consisted of most smokers dying and the rest not repeating their mistakes.

Me or my brothers most probably will never be smokers. I have absolutely no doubt my parents, uncle and aunt will smoke their way to the grave, same as my grandparents did.

> [...] and the rest not repeating their mistakes. [...]

That is a win in my eyes! :D

It is interesting that planes are all still made with ashtrays in the bathrooms. I believe the reasoning is something like: "You are not allowed to smoke, but if you do smoke, we don't want you starting a trash fire."

Yes, exactly right, because just that very thing happened in the 1970s and 100+ people lost their lives. They are mandatory equipment.

Also helps ID the smoker for a meeting with the authorities when they land

In the UK we had big pub ashtrays that doubled as advertisements, being adorned with the names and logos of (now mostly vanished) beer or spirits brands. Naturally these would often find their way into smokers' homes.

Yes, this was exactly my thought. An ashtray to my mind is a beer branded plastic type thing. They also weren't entirely fireproof so they were often slightly melted if someone left a lit cigarette on it, or the contents set on fire.

My grandparents ashtrays were ornate glass structures though.

Beyond smoking rates plummeting in recent years, indoor smoking rates were plummeting for years before that, and that's when you normally saw ash trays. I was a smoker for a couple of decades and never once had a dwelling I smoked in, and that was true for many other smokers I knew. That became socially frowned-upon long before smoking lost its momentum. I have noticed that even the dubiously effective large smokeless self-extinguishing public ash trays that were ubiquitous outside of bars/clubs/etc in the 2010s are becoming less common.

I am so glad smoking is prohibited in public places. I can't stand it all, and my wife is allergic to it. Next I would love to see more restrictions on driving loud noised cars and bikes, every time I see a Harley owner ride by with a loud noise or a truck owner drive by, I can't feel anything but contempt for such lowlife humans who have no regards for other people's and animals' sensitivities.

>I can't feel anything but contempt for such lowlife humans

Sounds to me like you could use some therapy, it's not good to have this much hatred inside.

It's ok if someone does something that bothers you, some noise or some smoke won't kill you, it's just perspective, objectively it doesn't hurt you in any way, but the reason it does is because you have these strong beliefs against it, so you basically choose to be hurt.

I travelled for hours next to a crying baby and didn't let myself complain about it, why would I? the mom knows he's bothering others, but what can she do about it? leave her baby behind or not travel? What if it's something important? have some sympathy for people some day you might be in their place.

Also your wife isn't allergic to smoke, cigarette smoke isn't an allergen.

Have some sympathy for people that are sensitive to noise. The OP didn't mention babies, he mentioned motorcycles and loud trucks.

>objectively it doesn't hurt you in any way, but the reason it does is because you have these strong beliefs against it, so you basically choose to be hurt.

If you acknowledge it does hurt them in some subjective way, why do you assume that the reason it hurts them is because they have strong beliefs about it, and not the other way around?

Severe asthma cases exist, not "allergic" per se, but can cause negative health effects. Also it sounds like they have contempt but I didn't detect hatred, hatred is a very strong and very real emotion but the name calling didn't do it for me. And finally, babies cry and nothing can be done about it. But there are people who choose to alter their vehicles to be extremely loud, who then intentionally Rev their engines at quiet points of the day and night, repeatedly subjecting everyone within a mile radius to literal window shaking noise, every day. Now I want to say, I do _hate_ those people. I view that as equivalent to pinching a baby till it screams and then shoving it in your face. They're making active antisocial choices, with the intent of harm. And in my experience they know how to not get caught.

And then there's the "coal rollers". People who have such contempt for the environment that they specifically and intentionally spend time and money to alter their vehicles so that they can harm other people and publicly display their Negativity. I _might_ hate those people, I certainly don't like them.

Noise objectively hurts though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_from_noise

After air pollution, noise pollution is considered to be the most important environmental stressor to humans[0]. So I agree, noise is important. And I don't miss the public smoke either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_from_noise

A friend’s grandparents visited the Soviet Union during the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Because they defied the American boycott (they had already bought tickets) the Soviet government made a point of showing them around. There is a National Geographic article about their visit that closes by mentioning that Soviet life is filled with tyranny: for instance you were not allowed to smoke on the airplanes there!

I've been taking a pottery/wheel class for a few years. When you first start out on the wheel, you usually end up making a small ashtray looking dish, because it's like a dish with grooves on the side where you messed up.

The teacher always laments how no one smokes anymore and we have to just discard it instead of glazing it and using it as an ashtray!

I don't think you can only blame it on less people smoking. I'm pretty sure I only remember a single person's apartment (in my age range) who actually smoked INSIDE. All the other (heavy) smokers, still went to their balcony, even in winter. No one wanted to have the smell inside their apartment/house, even if it was a pack a day.

Ashtrays at home have indeed been a thing of the past - but all the restaurants around here have them on the outside tables, as you're allowed to smoke there - from the first paragraph... that doesn't seem to be the case where the author is living? That part feels weird, it's not like a teenager would never encounter one...

Interesting fact for those (including myself) who always wondered on flights why there are still ashtrays in the lavatories despite signs everywhere saying no smoking: "Now, ashtrays in bathrooms are listed by as a legal requirement for “minimum equipment” by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). So seriously is the regulation taken that in 2009 a Mexico-bound British airways flight was grounded after it was discovered not to be packing any ashtrays. (https://time.com/4919780/airplanes-smoking-tray-ashtrays-air...)

For years as a young child in the 70s, I had to wash and dry the family dishes, but the worst part was cleaning ashtrays every day in the greasy dishwater.

Obviously,you had to use a different set of towels for the ashtrays. If you complained… Your prognosis would not be good.

Growing up in the 80s people would smoke sitting next to kids in cinemas and airplanes. I always wondered why I felt so sick while traveling &days out to the mall... have since realised it was nicotine/tobacco smoke poisoning.

Man, right up there with VHS tapes, floppy disks, and payphones in terms of "things that I grew up with I thought would always be there, until they were not".

I saw them again in Japan 12 years ago. Video arcades were lousy with them, and I came to understand why when I encountered a very sad-looking young woman smoking profusely and playing Tekken. Arcades were like poolhalls or bowling alleys: loci of working-class leisure. Of course they were going to accommodate smoking as a stress beater, since Japan was well behind the west in terms of socially deprecating tobacco use. I think even Japanese society is changing in this regard.

Global cigarette sales peaked around 2011. Later than I want but glad it's behind us.

(Ok, it's because vaping is a substitution product but let's pretend this paragraph doesn't exist. Hopefully we're on the way down)

Plenty of ashtrays still around in bars and casinos - and even though they're rare to see inside of homes, they ain't all that rare in backyards or on front porches. Of course, rarely are they ever so ornate as the wonderful examples in the article; if anything they nowadays seem designed to stand out as little as possible.

My dad, toward the end of his life, was a heavy-enough smoker that an ashtray on the porch was insufficient. His solution? Fill an empty milk jug partway with water and drop butts into that.

While it's great to see smoking becoming less ubiquitous, it was kinda cool to see a small niche of high-end creativity in making modern ashtray furniture as part of Seth Rogen's weed×pottery start-up[0]

Surprised it wasn't mentioned in the article given his renown (unless I overlooked it while reading) - he's even got the standing type heavily featured in the article.

https://www.houseplant.com/collections/ashtrays

In my place in Lisbon there's an ashtray next to the toilet with a little curved piece where you can rest your lit cigarette while you sit on the bog. A fascinating relic of a former time.

I remember my first professional job in 2008 and noticing the lifts in the building had ashtrays in them. I couldn't fathom smoking in such a confined space with others!

I suspect smoking was banned in the lifts but, much like the ashtrays that still exist in airplane bathrooms, it is better that one exists for rule breakers than a fire is started because someone decides to drop the butt on the carpet and stamp it out.

I love it, a _nicotine hearth_. As a child of the 80s, I remember these things quite well. I also remember smoking in restaurants, stores, malls, et. al.

I'm in the process now of converting my 1986 VW Vanagon ashtrays into USB and 12V accessory outlets.

About 15 years ago I flew from Oregon by way of San Francisco and Taipei to Malaysian Borneo (22 hours of travel) on a budget airline. The airplane, a fairly old 747, had ashtrays in the armrests still, though there was no smoking. That's when I knew it was _too_ budget...

You used to be able to smoke at your desk at work!

I had an office that was stained yellow because my predecessor smoked. Even after they banned smoking in buildings, the owner/CEO etc would still do it. They'd get a little window installed, a fan, or a pull-out drawer that had an ashtray in it.

I haven't seen a computer destroyed by cigarette smoke in a looong time.

The article says in the 60's 40% of Americans smoked and now it's down to 11%. Meaning in the 60's 40% of Americans were on stimulants and now it's down. What affect does having so much of the population on stimulants have? What affect does having much fewer of the population on stimulants have?

Smoke used to be the smell of jazz. Going to hear live music was the only thing that could get me to second hand smoke.

During a short visit to Washington DC, my eight year-old son was delighted to find a bowl of matchbooks by the door in a restaurant. He'd seen matchsticks, but never a matchbook. I had forgotten about that small moment of juvenile joy grabbing a matchbook on the way out of a restaurant.

The end of ash trays coincides with decreasing cash use in my mind. Growing up, my dad's car had a cavernous ash tray (I'm guessing that he removed an insert) for all his loose change and loyalty punch cards.) I don't have any good place to deal with loose change.

I've worked in FinTech for a while and I remember one of the old timers at an investment bank trading floor telling me that the desks used to have ashtrays built into them.

They were right on the edge of the desk so the cleaning people could just sweep th ashes into a trashcan.

I see almost every other person vaping now, instead of smoking. Hell I'd see people vape in the office lol and its both men and women doing it.

Maybe in 50 years people will realize hey that was terrible for our health! They will stop doing that, and replace it with some new vice :)

Ahh the human condition.

I found an old Disneyland ashtray at a garage sale once. I think this is amusing https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=vintage+Disneyland+asht...

Don't fret, the world of legal cannabis is helping to keep the ashtray alive. As we millennial stoners turn into middle aged adults we're learning to do things like ash into ashtrays instead of old cups and have nice decor in our homes

Any time this topic comes up, I remember this very specific moment as a kid when I went into a Tim Horton’s and a corner of the shop was made into a room with glass. And inside that room was so smoky. I remember thinking it was like a human terrarium.

That Gallup survey doesn't really scan for me. If you had told me in 2001 that 35% of my generation were smokers I would not have believed that. There must be a huge regional component to those survey responses.

Too high or low? It sounds about right to me, if you include the casual smokers in the 35%.

Too high. I do not and did not know any smokers of my age in high school, college, or after. Seriously zero, which would be odd if it was really one-third. And I'm from Oklahoma which has a high rate of smoking, but I associate it with my friends' grandparents.

Also in the Midwest, I'd say 10% of both my high school and college classes smoked, maybe slightly higher if you count those that smoked while drinking, but about half of my friends in my age group that did not go to college smoked.

I'd honestly guess you either didn't notice them or forgot that they smoked. As a former smoker the bars were filled with people smoking until the indoor bans when you could always find some outside.

You must have gone to a pretty well-to-do school, because in my D rated high school in FL in the early 00s, it was fairly common for teens to smoke.

35% sounds right from that time frame. I smoked until Dec 1999 and almost everyone in my social circle smoked.

I would believe at least 25% any time before 2000. It wasn't really until the late 90s that anti-smoking really got ingrained in the general psyche, and there was still quite a bit of inertia. Plus kids who were raised by smokers were more likely to smoke.

The number of smokers back then was always vastly under-reported, because it was all about self-reporting. In my school nearly everybody smoked, at least women and girls did - I counted them. 87% of the girls in my school smoked. There would be one or two in each class who didn't, but everyone else did. Still, most of them would say they didn't smoke, if you asked them - because they didn't smoke all the time. So the official number was something like 30-40%, a completely fake number.

(These days things are different, fortunately. I don't see many young people smoke anymore, but the mentality was completely different back then, around the time when it was still allowed to smoke indoors everywhere)

Great timing with this post—I was literally just looking at general aviation airplanes from the 70s and noticed that they had ashtrays for the passengers! That is almost as bad as ashtrays at the doctors office.

The ashtray has been replaced by the ubiquity of the cupholder--more obesity.

I put my refillable water containers in my cupholders…

I was born in 1962. I remember in first grade art class (1967/8) we made ashtrays out of clay! (The teacher then fired them in an oven).

Can you imagine having 6-year-olds making ashtrays in school in 2023?

This was a really big ashtray:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92N2sOqDYs0

I remember ashtrays in elevators. Imagine smoking in an elevator, and the person complaining about it was considered the idiot, not the smoker.

Movie theaters has them on the back of seats. Ashtrays we're in the stalls in restrooms. Thank goodness they're gone. Stinky and unsanitary.

Stinky, sure but unsanitary? Its ash. And no self respecting smoker will get the butt wet with saliva, its bad form.

Its more sanitary than chewing gum! (And civilized, but chewing gum is a low bar)

Sweet but the photos don't show the omnipresent nauseous smell penetrating you up from the hair down to the socks. The absolute global ban of smoking was the best thing since the fall of Communism and no design will make me sentimental about it.

I think those big, heavy glass ashtrays were aesthetically pleasing on a coffee table. One can fill them with nuts, olives or M&Ms.

McDonalds used to have ashtrays in the dining area!

Everywhere did!

Airplanes have ashtrays in the armrests to this day!

No, those are pretty much gone. An ashtray in airplane lavatories, though, remains mandatory by law, right next to the "no smoking" sign.

To be fair, I haven't flown since 2019, but the armrests still had ash trays. But yeah, new airplanes won't. Wild about the lavatories though.

On some older planes you still see the spaces they used to be, but typically they're welded shut so people don't cram them full of chewing gum etc. But modern seats have super lightweight liftable armrests that don't even have space for an ashtray.

https://thepointsguy.com/news/molon-labe-new-staggered-econo...

The lavatories have them because occasionally some people will smoke there, and you don't want them to drop the cigarette in the paper trash and kill everybody in the plane when it starts a fire (which apparently has happened, in the past). http://www.iasa.com.au/folders/Safety_Issues/RiskManagement/... But if you google a bit there appears to be lots of fires still, when cigarettes are dumped in trash cans.. so either not all planes have ash trays in the lavatories, or some are too stupid to use them, or maybe they want to hide that they smoke by stuffing the cigarette deep down into the paper trash..

They had glass ones at one time. Later, they had those semi-disposable ones made out of pressed heavy-gauge aluminum foil. You can still buy them on eBay.

They were right next to the station with the napkins and the straws. An artist friend used to steal stacks of them because he used them to mix paint on them.

  ashtrays :: cigarettes :: cancer
  cup holder :: fructose beverage :: ?

Fatty liver disease for one:

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/is-fructose-bad-for-you-...

Nothing reminds me more than a ubiquitous no smoking sign on airplanes.

A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.

"It reeks." "Toxic fumes."

Same's true of ICE automobile exhausts. In far more voluminous quantities. The whole "great outdoors" is their ashtray. When will they be banned?

In EU, 2035.

2035 in EU: https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/eu-approves-effective...

Ok, not quite, and the motivation is different, but the days of ICE are numbered.

I would buy a long range EV but they are crazy expensive. I wish the governments could support consumers more in this.

> long range EV

That's called a train.

I am sure I can park the train in my garage.

How about coal power plants?

The biggest baddie is fossil fuel though, if we're talking smokes. I wish them all gone though, to be honest.

https://earth.org/causes-and-effects-of-air-pollution/

Even arcade consoles had ashtrays built in. Crazy.

What about spitting tray for chewing tobacco?

Looking forward to the day where the rest of Not-New-Zealand goes "actually, yeah, let's just ban this nonsense, this industry does not need to exist", and then have that industry cease to exist over the course of a, really too generous, "only existing addicts can buy your product" period.

Why? Like I get that it’s a nuisance when other people don’t have a choice but be forced to be around it which makes restaurant and workplace bans make sense, can’t you let people make their own choices though?

I like to smoke very occasionally and am not at all addicted, a lot of people are like this. Way too little to have meaningful effect sizes on long term health.

Time to read up on how NZ implemented it. Already smoke, even if incidentally? You're 100% unaffected, you can still buy them until you die from old age. Too young? Cool, you're never going to get ciggies sold to you, and you're not going to miss suddenly no longer have access to them because you never did anyway. No one loses. It's a very long term solution, and one that (the current forms of) the US or Europe could never pass.

That is missing the point of letting people make their own choices.

I'm glad I got that choice of breathing my dads secondhand smoke growing up!

Um...

he made that choice for you. children have choices made for them in droves.

children rarely have the ability -- or are given the opportunity -- to make choices for themselves.

Not a lot of infants going around asking for circumcisions and ear-piercings, but...

> Not a lot of infants going around asking for circumcisions and ear-piercings, but...

Those are wrong too, what's your point?

Before we let people make choices about smoking, I'd rather let them do heroin or cocaine. At least that does not force me to inhale their smoke. But as a more general answer, we (as society) always make trade-offs with letting people make their own choices, and forbidding behavior for the better of society. The boundaries will always be somewhat arbitrary.

That said, the economic costs of smoking to society is significant and there are some corporations that essentially make a killing on it (don't get me started on the anti-science propaganda that they funded. If people want to smoke tobacco in their own home, sure let them grow their own, so at least there is not a corporation who tries to peddle smoking to children in order to improve their profits.

Not really, it feels like you forgot the distinction between personal choice, where the decision affects only you, and group choice, where a decision is made for, and affects everyone in a group. Smoking falls in that second category, so it's not just your decision to make, the entire group gets to weigh in. So they did. Democracy works, even if (especially if) you don't like the result.

What happens to immigrants or tourists? Is vaping included? I don't smoke but am curious about how this type of phase out system works.

Why should anyone care? Let them tough it out.

I imagine industries that depend on tourism would care, if a decent chunk of potential tourists are smokers. I personally would prefer if there were no smokers (I have asthma), but I could understand that tourism-focused industries would be concerned about turning off groups of tourists that include at least one smoker.

New Zealand is an ecotourism destination, officially and explicitly marketed as such. If anything, banning smoking would increase the perceived quality of their stay for anyone in that segment.

Are tourists able to purchase Tabacco?

There are a lot of people who insist that prohibition never works. I wonder if this is successful it will change their minds.

I think there’s some nuance here. You can’t totally prohibit something people really want to do, but you can pretty effectively prohibit something almost no one wants to do or where there is a very good substitute.

Having a tiny landmass, and no land borders also helps. It’s possible to grown tobacco hydroponically but I’m not sure if anyone would bother unless there was an overnight hard ban.

That's a reasonable line of thought, but NZ already has a fairly robust black market for tobacco products: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/12/17/new-zealands-pl...

> a tenth of the tobacco consumed in 2019 in New Zealand was illicit.

which is broadly similar to the US market, if admittedly on the low end: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/19016/understandin...

> the portion of the total U.S. tobacco market represented by illicit sales has grown in recent years and is now between 8.5 percent and 21 percent

I think a lot of people underestimate how difficult combating smuggling is, even with a tiny landmass and no land borders. Nobody's checking every container, much less package.

That’s very true, and I wouldn’t claim it could be 100% effective. Even East Germany had rock albums smuggled in.

Nicotine is still available to the younger generation in the form of vapes. It isn't a strict prohibition, it's an effort at harm reduction by turning people away from the worst method of ingestion. And, yeah, time will tell.

It will not.

They will see the microscopically minuscule number of people who still smoke due to the black market and claim the entire effort to be an abject failure.

They will ignore the millennia of higher quality lifespan added to the population, the massive savings in public healthcare expenses, and the almost-non-existent second hand damage smoking does and just focus on the thousand or so people smoking smuggled cigarettes.

When you suggest that their position is somewhat analogous to not passing laws against murder because "well that dude over there got murdered so OBVIOUSLY the laws aren't not working" they will just look at you funny.

I still remember the ad campaigns from the 90s.

"I saw a girl walking down the street and I was like yeaaaahh and then i saw her light up a cigarette and I was like nah.... smoking usn't sixy"

Thank goodness. I don't want to ever model the US after some captive remote island social experiment in the southern pacific.

We can't even stop methamphetamine or main street money laundering, this cigarette ban is not going to be effective.

To each their own, but personally - I don’t find them beautiful or nostalgic at all. They remind me of the stench of stale smoke and death.

> “Even if your parents don’t smoke, it’s nice for them to have an ashtray available for guests.”

…the thought of someone trying to light up a cig in my house. Haha. No.

Same. They remind me of worse times. It was very clear to me as a child that smoking was killing my grandfather. It eventually did. I'm glad I never see these any more.

Archive link? Paywall'd here

(we moved the reply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34497773 to the top of the thread)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com