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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

• ptaffs 4y ago
  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.
• gumby 4y ago
  Do you remember professors smoking in class or office hours? The student smoking area in high school?
  • dudul 4y ago
    There was a smocking area for students in my high school. Never seen anyone smocking in classrooms though.
  • 13of40 4y ago
    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.
  • Turing_Machine 4y ago
    At one time, a pipe was nearly as stereotypical of professors as a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows.
  • throwaway81523 4y ago
    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.
  • Stratoscope 4y ago
    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/MTU4NDI2ODU5NTc3NTUwMTgw/camels_doctors_whiteshirt.jpg https://www.history.com/.image/t_share/MTU4NDI2ODU5NTc3NTUwM...
  • karaokeyoga 4y ago
    We called it "the smoke hole".
  • TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    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 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
    • kens 4y ago
      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.
    • mikestew 4y ago
      Brownsville Station was singing that song in the early 70s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smokin%27_in_the_Boys_Room 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.
• microtherion 4y ago
  > 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.
  • ornornor 4y ago
    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.
    • netsharc 4y ago
      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.
      • Freak_NL 4y ago
        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.
• dspillett 4y ago
  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)
  • dspillett 4y ago
    Of cause I meant "non smoking" not "non smiling" above. Slide keyboard and auto-carrot strike again!
    • toyg 4y ago
      In '80s UK, a "non-smiling" section would have been totally credible. The place was grim.
• jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
  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).
  • drra 4y ago
    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.
  • cookrn 4y ago
    People would smoke in church? During the service?
    • ornornor 4y ago
      “Hey, if god didn’t want me to smoke he shouldn’t have invented cigarettes”
    • jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
      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.
    • loeg 4y ago
      If a lot of worshipers smoked outside just beforehand, it would still smell of stale cigs inside.
    • rprospero 4y ago
      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.
• Stratoscope 4y ago
  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 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-candy-cigarette 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!
  • camillomiller 4y ago
    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?
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • bruce511 4y ago
      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.
      • htag 4y ago
        I have heard of people using nicotine gum, patch, or lozenge for situations like this.
• OkayPhysicist 4y ago
  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.
  • HyperSane 4y ago
    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.
    • TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
      Key word: almost
      • tb_technical 4y ago
        It's certainly safe enough that the NHS is using vaping to get people off smoking
        • TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
          [flagged]
        • ornornor 4y ago
          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.
          • 4y ago
• relwin 4y ago
  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...
  • fortran77 4y ago
    My first computer programming jobs, everybody smoked. Our ADM-3A terminals had cigarette burns on them.
    • Tor3 4y ago
      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).
    • wrldos 4y ago
      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.
  • themodelplumber 4y ago
    You ever see the plastic furnishings on those old Japanese business flights that allowed smoking? P h e w
• userbinator 4y ago
  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.)
  • cobbzilla 4y ago
    Many Vegas casinos have similar ventilation systems, it’s amazing to be near smokers and barely smell it.
    • gymbeaux 4y ago
      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.
    • cranekam 4y ago
      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).
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• jghn 4y ago
  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?”
• paulpauper 4y ago
  People were desperate for a high, an escape, to kill time, to beat the monotony. Today escape is through junk food.
  • HyperSane 4y ago
    And video games and porn.
    • bentobean 4y ago
      And their phone.
  • ornornor 4y ago
    At least it truly is an individual choice now, others can’t get sick from someone else eating junk food.
• petre 4y ago
  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.
  • j33zusjuice 4y ago
    Even the smokers? They were all throwing hissy fits in the US.
    • petre 4y ago
      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.
      • Tor3 4y ago
        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.
        • johnwalkr 4y ago
          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.
• HyperSane 4y ago
  Smoke in bars could be so thick it would sting your eyes and your clothes would reek after you left.
  • bluedino 4y ago
    The irony of worrying about your lungs while you're destroying your liver.
• bentobean 4y ago
  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.
• petsormeat 4y ago
  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!
  • nsxwolf 4y ago
    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.
  • wintermutestwin 4y ago
    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.
• heavyset_go 4y ago
  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/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4369587/
  • gymbeaux 4y ago
    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.
    • defrost 4y ago
      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-environment/15-6-domestic-environments https://www.tobaccoinaustralia.org.au/chapter-15-smokefree-e...
    • tb_technical 4y ago
      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.
• antihipocrat 4y ago
  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.
• kitsunesoba 4y ago
  > 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.
  • ashtonbaker 4y ago
    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.
  • toast0 4y ago
    > 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.
  • jedberg 4y ago
    > I heard it many times at a buffet-style steakhouse my family would go to for get-togethers, birthdays, etc. Sizzler?
• HelixEndeavor 4y ago
  > 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.
• myroon5 4y ago
  Almost half the states still haven't banned smoking indoors in public places: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smoking_bans_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smoking_bans_in_the_Un... Still common in bars in those states
  • blahedo 4y ago
    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".
    • dwater 4y ago
      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.
  • chrisco255 4y ago
    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.
    • kibwen 4y ago
      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.
• sircastor 4y ago
  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.
• alfiedotwtf 4y ago
  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
  • alfiedotwtf 4y ago
    I should have explained the baby powder - it helped when doing the Melbourne Shuffle
• jmspring 4y ago
  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.
• lynx23 4y ago
  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.
• secretsatan 4y ago
  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.
• jamil7 4y ago
  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.
• bambax 4y ago
  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-l300.webp https://i.ebayimg.com/thumbs/images/g/m3sAAOSwqEZjlkoe/s-l30...
  • rwmj 4y ago
    My primary school teacher chain-smoked in class. (She did later die of lung cancer while we were still school age.)
    • bambax 4y ago
      Wow. Where and when was this?
      • rwmj 4y ago
        Poorer part of the UK in the 1980s.
  • b800h 4y ago
    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.
  • henrikschroder 4y ago
    > 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.
• grujicd 4y ago
  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.
  • larrysalibra 4y ago
    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.
• zikduruqe 4y ago
  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.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• gvurrdon 4y ago
  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.
• fatnoah 4y ago
  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.
• deleted 4y ago
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• greedo 4y ago
  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.
• lopis 4y ago
  > I remember coming home from bars reeking of smoke Unfortunately, that's still common in Germany, most notably in Berlin.
• grishka 4y ago
  > 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.
• dkarl 4y ago
  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.
  • mancerayder 4y ago
    >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.
  • rolenthedeep 4y ago
    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.
• SergeAx 4y ago
  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.