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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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)

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.

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.

35% sounds right from that time frame. I smoked until Dec 1999 and almost everyone in my social circle smoked.

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