2mo ago

I celebrated when cigarettes were banned in restaurants

173 comments

My parents always used to sit in the smoking sections.
And they always smoked a few cigarettes during the meal.
I was so happy when they finally banned the cigarettes in restaurants. My parents were pissed.
- The crazy thing about this is that I did too. Then I was old enough to go to restaurants on my own. I also smoked, but you know what I did? I fucking went outside like a godamn person. I don't smoke anymore but the idea of subjecting everyone else to my bullshit isn't okay.
  
  As a non-smoker (cigarettes) who grew up as smoking was pushed outdoors, the one thing I feel like I truly missed out on is the social aspect of it. If you walk out front with a cigarette and/or a lighter, you've already got a conversation starter with literally anyone else standing outside (and then by extension, anyone else that they might be there with).
  Just a massive tool for meeting people that I feel like I missed out on completely. Not sure if it's enough to regret not smoking, but still...
  
  Same same same. My friend was bartending when they banned in New York and she smoked. I couldn't believe how happy she was. She's like, I'll just go take a break, and not have to have this every second this whole bar.
- As a non cigarette smoker who has tried them once or twice, the thought of taking a drag of a cigarette during a meal makes me want to vomit. It has to completely ruin the taste of whatever you are eating.
  Afterwards, I understand. Maybe before if you're trying to reduce your appetite or some shit. But during? That seems insane to me.
  
  It has to completely ruin the taste of whatever you are eating
  Smoking really destroys your tastebuds so it's not like smoking while eating makes a huge difference anyway.
  
  When you've been smoking for a few years, you lose a lot of your taste.
  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5329949/

Reminder to anyone who still smokes: you smell like shit 100% to anyone you interact with.
And any place you still smoke in, whether your car or home, also smells like shit.
And to delivery drivers who smoke, the packages you deliver smell like shit, too!
- Positive reinforcement works better for helping people quit :(
  Especially when quitting smoking tanks a person's dopamine levels. It takes weeks for the body to re-regulate production.
  To anyone reading this who has quit/is quitting: congratulations! It's tough, you have shown a force of willpower and should be proud of yourself.
  Love, a fellow Canadian.
  Edit:
  As with other forms of punishment, aversive methods are generally less effective than positive approaches. It is more important to reward and praise desirable behaviors than to react negatively to unwanted ones. Encouraging a person’s ability to enjoy self-affirmation and self-pride will help them internalize healthy attributes and to become a person deserving of admiration...Shame doesn’t motivate prosocial behaviors; it fuels social withdrawal and low self-esteem.
  Source: took some psych courses
  &
  https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/longing-nostalgia/201705/why-shaming-doesnt-work
  
  Positive reinforcement is the act of adding either a reward for good behavour or a punishment for bad behavior.
  It seems like both of you are doing that.
  
  I'm not trying to convince someone to quit; that's up to them to derive enough motivation to do so on their own.
  I'm just pointing out that their disgusting habit affects everyone around them, if it's not killing them through second-hand smoke.
  I say this as someone who used to smoke 1–2 packs a day, and WISH that someone told me that I smelled as bad as I did. To me, smoking was never about impacting other people, so having known that, I would have at least been more mindful.
  
  I know intellectually that's true but in my cursed heart I really don't want to be nice to people who are, like, barely approaching a reasonable standard of behavior. Not just with smoking. Like, littering, taking up too much space on the subway, whatever.
  It's just frustrating how everyone (including me some of the time, I'm sure) is just like an emotionally fragile toddler. Except if you're not nice to them, they might shoot you.
  edit: Thinking about it, my parents were always like "You don't get rewarded for doing what's expected of you", so that's probably why rewarding someone for doing the basics feels insane to me.
- It's so nasty when you get delivery and the food reeks of cigarettes.
  One time it smelled of coppertone sunscreen which was wild and also off putting but in very different ways.
  
  I got a coffee from Dunkin Donuts once that had been prepared by someone who had some kind of topical menthol cream all over their hands. That was the second most disgusting thing I've put in my mouth.
- I was born with a deviated septum, so I can't smell much of anything, but cigarette is one thing I can smell... And I can confirm everything in your post.
  My dad used to smoke. A lot. I once had to borrow his car for a week or so and couldn't even drive it without flooding it with febreze and opening all the windows.
  I used to have a co-worker who smoked so much that I (and others with more sensitive schnozzes) could tell if he'd been in a room in the past hour or more.
  Even if you don't care about your own health, you shouldn't smoke for the sake of those around you.
  
  Even more pleasant was being driven around in a car with dad smoking in the front seat while you're behind him. Getting all that wind, smoke and ash in your face. Mmm. Or if it's too cold he doesn't wanna open the window really and basically just hotboxes me and my two brothers with nicotine. (This was 25+ years ago)
- Hey, if you smoke in you car, involuntary discount is applied on the price of your car in case you ever wanted to sell it! Because nobody wants to buy your stinkermobile.
  It fucking sucks to get rid of the smell. It's possible, but it's not sweet.
- I agree but it is kinda nice being able to smell how stressed my boss is

Between the massive corporate wealth at stake and the millions of people literally addicted to the product, it's hard now to imagine governments being able to ban them (and I lived through it).
- And now we have vaping.
  😭
  
  Infinitely better for health and can only be used in private spaces or outside in most countries, would rather have some rights than none
  
  Which the Aussie government banned, yet didn’t even touch cigarettes.
  
  In smoking areas or outside only.

For people too young to remember, a lot of people were against smoking bans. The argument was pretty simple: "Why not let the market decide? If you want to go to a bar with no smokers, go to one that doesn't allow smoking." This was persuasive to a lot of people.
But I recall that non-smoking bars were extremely rare and I would always end up smelling like smoke every time I went to the bar. The problem was basically that going to a non-smoking bar would exclude any friends that smoked, so bars that became non-smoking were limiting themselves to only those patrons who didn't smoke themselves and had no one in their group who did.
In hindsight, it betrays a fundamental problem with the "let the market decide" argument: there are situations where a small number of consumers with uncommon preferences can end up altering the whole market such that the majority of consumers are forced into un-ideal purchases. In the case of smoking at bars, it was actually better to say "Hey you few people who smoke, you're kinda fucking up everything and we do actually need big government to step in and stop you from doing that."
- In the UK, most places had a non-smoking section (even restaurants 🤮) which was just part of the same room. No barriers or anything. The whole place stank no matter where you sat
  
  Same in the US. And it wasn't hard to get seated at a non-smoking table right next to the smoking section since there was no space between the tables or anything.
  Airplanes were even worse.
- I liked the no-smoking in bars even when i smoked. But pulling an archived post with 13 points and 100 comments to display prominent opinion is pretty fun times.
  
  I actually started with the Dennis Miller rant on it because that's what I thought of first, but then I realized Dennis Miller sucks and I don't want to make people sit through that so I searched for someone else arguing it...
- Opposite of how people with allergies changed the market. Sure maybe a group of people are without allergies but a very large group are with various allergies. If you broke them down they’d be smaller groups but it made more sense to just accommodate. And you can’t really tell someone with an allergy to just stop having the allergy. Though some restaurants will deny it should be part of their culture or unheard of.

And airplanes. People used to smoke in airplanes.
Also it was a freaking huge industry to kill all the whales in the sea.
Once upon a time it was common to mine ice.
The world can be changed.
- a freaking huge industry to kill all the whales in the sea
  One of the wildest aspects of this was that they did it from fucking rowboats. I've never understood why the whales didn't just leisurely swim away from that bullshit.
  
  Because they didn't know how the harpoons worked until they had been harpooned.
- Would you believe that they had a smoking section on airplanes? That is, you could smoke in the back of the plane, but not forward of a certain row number.
  Makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?
  
  With how hvac works when setup correctly it actually does.
  It still isn’t ideal and I’m very happy it isn’t a thing anymore.
- Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
  -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
- https://futureofagriculture.com/episode/history-of-agriculture-how-refrigeration-changed-everything

Ah yes, the smoking section, and the second-hand-smoking section in restaurants

as a young person who hates cigarettes and recently went to las vegas for the first time, it was wild walking around the casinos thinking "this is what everywhere used to smell like, its incredibly disgusting!" I'm glad we managed to stop smoking indoors, probably one of the greatest advances of society.
- There’s an enclosed area in the Las Vegas airport where people can smoke while using the slot machines. If you ever find yourself here and are curious what it’s like to live with parents who chain smoke, visit this awful little piece of hell and you will satisfy that curiosity.
- I went to a casino for my 21st birthday and the stench of cigarettes in the non-smoking section was enough for me to never want to return. That and it was almost entirely penny slots and I got bored of those as soon as the novelty of actually gambling wore off

Yeah, I remember the tail end of this. Dedicated smoking rooms, or smoking carriages on trains. Or cafés and restaurants that would promote themselves as places where you could freely smoke.
Thankfully that's all gone now.
- Hear me out though:
  Smoking train carriage...
  ...for weed
  
  How about not smoking at all?
  Smoking means you're exposing a pair of very sensitive organs to air that is relatively densely saturated with burnt particulates for prolonged periods of time. It doesn't matter what you're smoking, it'll always be bad.
  Moreover, it's not a very efficient delivery system, as a lot of the working "stuff" gets burned and rendered useless.
  You want weed? Go make tea or edibles. Much better in every way.

If you as much as had a coffee out you used to have to immediately wash everything you were wearing down to your socks. Turns out, jeans don't automatically stink if you cross your front door with them. Who knew.
It's been a while, but that tobacco smell on clothes was so weird. It smelled sweaty even if it wasn't, like you had been jogging through a house fire. So gross.
- Tbf, that was not only smoke from cigarettes. Combustion engines and furnaces used to add a lot of smoke, too, before the use of catalysators and filters became compulsory.
  
  Yep, pop down to a classic car show and stand behind a running MK1 Escort
  That's what the rest of the world smelled like
  
  I'm sure that made it worse, but I used to live somewhere that only enacted an indoors ban in the late 2010s. It was the cigarettes.

Just want to add that the biggest objection that I have heard from coworkers and friends about making recreational Marijuanna legal is the smell. Walk around a downtown in any state it is legal for recreation in and the smell is everywhere.
Non-users don’t want to smell burning weed or tabacco as they go about their day.
- I'm with you, Marijuana smells just a awful to me (a non-smoker)
  
  Much worse than the smell of cigarettes, imo
- Yeah. I guess I don't really gaf that my neighbor smokes weed however I do hate that as a person who doesn't smoke weed I can't go into my garage or anywhere in my back yard without feeling smelling hardcore weed smell and my garage just accumulates it.
- I live in a legal state. You get whiffs once in a while, which is more funny than it is annoying to me.
  There are times when the smell lingers, and that's pretty gross.
  But other than that, it's not as choking/poisonous as the cloud of cigarette and car fumes.
  
  The car fumes are causing more cancer than the smoking. And is non majority directed at the user. We've known that for just as long as cigarettes being bad, yet people turned their head because they had good lobbying.
  Gas powered cars are worse than cigarettes. We could have switched to majority electric cars in the 70s, and all the gas stations would have just been electric chargers and the tech growth for batteries would have happened 50 years ago.
  Then again cars cause further damages to society than just fumes, but a lot of people don't care about the layout of towns/cities and access and accept deaths from cars as par for the course.
  
  I get whiffs of it walking downtown in a non-legal state.
- I live in a city where it's not legal an it smells loud enough now. I do think it should be legal, but I don't really care for the smell.
- I live in a state that legalized not too long ago, and I barely smell it. Almost never in public places. Sometimes, my older neighbor smokes in his garage but it’s not that strong. If it was, it still wouldn’t bother me.
- Yeah I walk downtown in my favorite city now and it smells like losers. It's a bummer.

"This is a non-smoking flight." Yeah, fucking who doesn't know that? It's like saying this is non-highjacking flight.
- You'd be surprised. Cuba's state airline only banned smoking in the 2010s, and Chinese pilots were allowed to smoke in the cockpit until the 2000s at least even though it was banned for passengers in the 1990s.
  Also, I guarantee you (considering people try to light up in the bathroom anyway) that if they didn't say that, people would try to smoke on planes more often.
- Aviation laws require the no smoking signs to be put there, and ash trays to be in the aircraft bathrooms even though smoking is of course never allowed. Sadly basically all the safety rules are because of some prior incident that cost lives. You would hope a reminder is enough but some think they know better than the rules.

I remember cigarette smoke on airplanes.
- And in my parent's car!
  
  Ugh, yeah, my parents too. My father smoked cigars and my mother cigarettes. I heard stories about how they drove me around as a baby in the trunk. The gasoline was leaded, the air tarred and there was no concern for car safety.
  
  For me the one I remember the most was a grocery store clerk smoking when ringing up the food. We did away with both the smoking and the clerk now, haha

I lived in hungary for a pretty long time and there everything still smells like cigarettes... moved to sweden the air is literally fresher and the grass is literally greener
- They don't have a public smoking ban? I thought that was EU-wide
  
  They may have(ive never heard of it) but you know nobodoys enforcing anything in hungary. Its also legal in spain but much fewer people smoke there.

I remember growing up in Ohio when we banned smoking, there were commercials CONSTANTLY about it.
Smoke FREE Ohio vs smoke LESS Ohio.
And even in school I could tell that smoke LESS Ohio was going to force places that didn't have smoking, to allow smoking in certain areas.
And the guy in the commercial for it acted incredulous that they would ban smoking in bars! The horror! A place where people are densely packed clearly should be filled with cancerous death fog, slowly killing people who want to be at the bar but not partake in death sticks.
I was super happy when the ban happened. I hated going to nearby states without the smoking ban.
It took years for golden corral to stop smelling like shit.
- I don't remember those commercials but yeah I remember when my eyes stopped hurting when we went out to eat and how nearby states just sucked until they joined in.
  My family were nearly all nonsmokers even my grandparents, and so it was something I was only really exposed to in restaurants and my parents hated it too
  
  I'll never forget the punchability of the guys face as he goes "[They want to ban smoking] in bars. That right! In bars!"

Negative health effects aside, I do kinda miss the smell of certain places - the smoking tables of a restaurant, an 80's arcade, the back bar of a country pub... not in a way that I liked the smell at all, but that's what it always was, and taking an element away from it leaves a noticeable gap.
I suppose people of a later generation will never remember the difference, much like I never really knew anything but colour TV.
That said, I absolutely 100% do not miss going out on the piss, getting home somehow, and waking up in my clothes that absolutely reeked of smoke. It was horrific. A quick wash never seemed to clear it fully either - it was either a wash that lasted so long that it looked like you bought your clothes from the children's aisle, or a whole day line drying to get rid of that stale smoke smell.
I'm glad the world is moving on.
- I'm not sure I would say that I "miss" them... But if I had a whiff, it would probably bring back some sort of feeling of nostalgia.
  
  Can confirm. Just the other day I walked past a bar where some folks were smoking outside and the combination of “bar smell” with the added hint of cigarette really sent me back to my childhood.

I still find it funny that we used to just have smoking and non-smoking sections, as if the smoke would stay entirely on the smoking side of the restaurant when they're not even physically seperated.
That shit sucked. I am a smoker myself and even I hate being in a closed room to smoke or be around others who are smoking. Casinos fucking suck for this. In California, the smoking ban doesn't include the native American casinos. You can smoke indoors (and drink at 18+) at Jackson Rancheria.
- Like in 2005 I worked in a restaurant with an smoking section that had an independent hvac systems for the two sections and a double door to enter the smoking section. It was expensive as fuck and the restaurant failed and everyone got laid off.
  
  That's excessive. You don't need entirely separate HVAC systems. You just need a small pressure differential. Wall in the smoking area and add an extra fan blowing to exhaust. The pressure difference means air flows in when the door opens rather than out.
  There was a restaurant in my area that did that once upon a time before the smoking section was abolished. It was actually pretty effective.
  
  It was a good idea, it was doomed from the start

A couple years ago I was in I-Hop with the fam and this young woman came in reeking like a walking ashtray. It brought back a semi-nostalgic memory of people I used to know who smoked so much it was in their clothes, their hair, their furniture, etc. - it was part of them. I never minded the smoke itself, it was that rancid cigarette butt stench that I always hated.
- asdfasdfasdfasfadsf

I remember this happening, and the smell went from just dirty and grim to a little bit of body odour. Many people complained, because they didn't want to smell people's BO, whereas 90% of others were just happy to not have clothes that stunk, or to be able to not have a sore throat after being at a club.
With that said, vaping is so much more commonplace today than smoking was. I've been to a few gigs in the last month or two, and people just vape wherever they want. Pretty much every venue, shopping center, and indoor area says you shouldn't vape, but it's just not enforced at all.
- Believe me when I tell you vaping is not more common place today than smoking was then. Yes, vaping is the norm today. Smoking was so common then though, you couldn't drive your car down the street without smelling cigarettes. At a red light you could play count the cigarettes hanging out the windows. Now I see a few vape clouds occasionally as I drive. Just know if you where alive in the early 90s or before and you think vaping today is more common place then cigarettes where then; you are simply remembering it wrong. Cigarettes were everywhere. Everywhere. The world was covered in cigarette butts. In front of every business was an ashtray that stunk, in every gutter of every sidewalk was butts. It was an aroma that was extremely difficult to find reprieve from.
  
  True, my point (as a man nearly in his forties) is that indoors vaping is more common, especially in venues where smoking was never allowed. Outside, everyone used to smoke all the time, and it was grim.
- I find vaping way less of an offensive smell than cigarettes. To me, cigarettes smell just gross.
  I also don't mind the smell of weed too much usually but maybe that's just me.
- Vaping doesn’t negatively affect anyone else’s health though so wanting to prohibit it is just trying to control. It’s like banning scotch because you hate the smell of peat
  
  I'm going to reinforce this by saying: the primary ingredients in vape liquid are also commonly found in fog machines. Vape devices use methods not dissimilar to fog machines to produce the "vape" that people inhale.
  I'll also point out that with vaping, enforcement is generally the problem. A lot of governments have previously, currently are, or will be discussing some kind of bans that affect vaping in a massively negative way. 90% of the time they're going to claim it's for the good of the children because thing makes kids want to vape. If the law was actually enforced as it currently stands, they couldn't get access to the products by any legal means.
  The lack of enforcement goes further than just nobody stopping vaping in places you shouldn't vape.

What a nightmare

My mom used to pick the smoking section. I'll never be able to empathize with that.

Still true in some parts of the EU

Now it just smells like vape
- Weed vape, but yeah.

I honestly don't know really anyone who thinks it's a bad thing, and back when it happened I was in bars a lot and knew some proper alkies who loved their ciggies.
It's crazy, people used to smoke on the dance floor even. Like the beat turns from fast to slow and you stamp out your cigarette so you can dance the slow one. Or even worse, you don't stamp it out, just put it between your lips and keep puffing while gently dancing away to the slow song with a partner. (Careful, don't burn her hair.)

Las Vegas and Reno casinos are still like that. I don't go often, but the few times that I have I gave up any of my mild interest to gamble when I realized how much smoke there was indoors.
- There are non smoking casinos
- Potentially dodged not one but two bullets there.

I wish we could have cigar bars now, along with venues to smoke bong hits inside.
- Yes
- Where do you live that doesn't have them? They do well in Florida and Tennessee. Laws for the most part ban smoking in establishments that make over a certain percentage off food. So some smoking bars open, and they usually do well. I never cared for smoking cigarettes inside of smoking bars, but cigar bars are more common.
  According to this site they are increasing year over year as well: https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/number-of-businesses/cigar-lounges-united-states/
- Every time I see a cigar smoker it reminds me of this.
- I used to go to a dispensary like that.

My grandpa quit smoking before I was born but all through my childhood I remember my grandparents house having a very distinct smell and I grew fond and nostalgic about it. I later learned what the smell was and I still kinda like it.
- I agree with the sentiment. I can't stand the smell of people actively smoking cigarettes. Gives me a headache. Places where people just finished smelling or where a lot of smokers were? Don't like that either.
  But the occasional house with smells? Almost cozy.
- My grandparents and parents almost all smoked, and I absolutely revile the smell, as well as grandmas smoky house smell. Yuck.
  Also, all of the smokers died from heart attacks and strokes in their early 60s, except my mom.

sry, but I like my drugs, also this depends on where you are, if you're in europe it still smells like cigarettes everywhere, but with a touch of strawberry ice vapes
- In Europe, doesn't smell like cigarettes everywhere
  
  where I live it does

I used to smoke and we never smoked inside because we knew it made the house stink and the walls yellow. The closest we got to smoking inside was smoking in the garage when it was so cold in the winter that it really wasn't a good idea to be outside in the first place.

I remember getting stuck in the smoking section of cracker barrel because the good section was full as a kid.

First time I flew on an airplane I sat in the smoking section. I was 15 yrs old then.

Still does in Japan and Montreal

I hate how so many cities smell like asphalt and burnt rubber. It is a disgusting smell and it makes our cities feel so dirty and nasty.

In Greece they still smoke there, even if it's banned.

I grew up in ghetto whitetrash America, wheee bit more than cigarettes

Some cities still do.

Cigarettes smell gross objectively but I get a wave of.....nostalgia I think? when I smell it
My parents never smoked, but on the rare occasion of going to a sit-down restaurant the whole place smelled of cigs despite being in the "non smoking" section. You know because you're still in the same room with them.
And when my dad would visit his fire department friends they'd all hang around and at least one of them had one lit up.
We do live in better times in some ways

I miss smoking but don't miss the smell.
- I liked the actual smell of burning cigarettes, but the stake smoke that lingered on your clothes and hair after a night bar hopping was gnarly.