Smoking rates were around 40% up through the 1970s. If you didn’t smoke, you almost certainly got it second hand. Which implies that up through the smoking bans of the 1990s, everyone (except maybe some farmers and other outdoorsy types) were on a psychoactive drug 24/7 at least a little.
I mean sure, nicotine is technically a psychoactive drug. But so is caffeine and theobromine, so should we stop giving kids chocolate? Ban all coffee shops? Honestly not sure what your point is here. Everything is drugs, at least a little.
That basically is my point. It’s eye opening for people who don’t think about drugs that way.
Ah okay i misunderstood. Regardless there were far more harmful things influencing everyone in the 70s than nicotine, like the thousands of toxic additives and carcinogens in secondhand smoke, or the lead in the paint and the gasoline.
The difference is, the rest of them are not being force fed to those who don’t want it.
Cigarette smoke is literally poisoning the lifeline of humans [1].
and everything that interacts with the atmosphere, including my computer. How many times have I had to get gunk off of the dust filters and fans and I tend to seal my room a lot more than the normal person ↩︎
I remember when the smoking ban was introduced in the UK and the smell of smoke in pubs and clubs was replaced by the stench of body odour, I was actually wanting smoking to return as it was a more tolerable smell!!
Either I’ve got used to it now or people have learned to wash because I don’t notice it anymore!
It was sick near me, the pubs now clean up properly.
Did not miss having to dodge cigs at waist height on dance floors though.
I wonder if our current world has a specific smell that people from the 80s would notice
People from the 40s would recognize the current smell of the world.
I feel like it’s probably the people from the ~1880s-1920s would know the smell of the world today
Cannabis. At least most major cities in Europe/North America I find it really common now to openly smell cannabis all hours of the day. Combination of the strains being MUCH stronger and legalization. Even just 20 years back, of course in the Haight in SF or certain parts of NYC you’d smell it, or outside clubs/bars at night. But today I walk through Downtown SF at 830am and smell it every other block. Was in the design district in NYC a few weeks back and same deal.
It’s common, but absolutely not omnipresent the way cigarette smoke was. Even now it’s quite distinctive and noticable, even if common.
Helps that most people don’t smoke a pack of joints every day.
At my work it constantly smells like cannabis because there’s a literal weed factory next door.
It’s great because I just blame my weed smell on the factory.
There’s more methane in the atmosphere now. It probably smells like a fart.
~~Methane needs 5-16PPM [PDF] to be detectable with human smell. Atmospheric Methane is at about 2ppm. So the vast majority of people would not notice a difference. ~~
nvm see below
methane doesn’t have an odor, you linked to the data sheet of trichlorofluoromethane, a completely different molecule
The gas in your house is artificially made stinky so that people would notice leaks and blow their house up, which happened a lot back when the stinky chemicals weren’t added and it was odorless
That’s what I get for moving quick, thank you. I guess the overall point that methane will not make the atmosphere smell still holds
I’m hoping car exhaust takes that role.
You used to be able to light the rivers on fire too but Nixon helped ruin that.
By signing the EPA into existence?
Don’t worry, Trump is working hard to bring it back! Make Waterways Burn Again!
And 500 more cigarettes
They apparently found a cure for cancer.
But not for brain rot
We visited friends in Serbia in summer. It took me back to this smoking world I had long forgotten. Inside smoking and non smoking tables in crowded cafes side by side. And the craziest part was the indoor playgrounds for kids with cafes adjacent or part of it where you could also smoke (and buy hard liquor). But you know what, my kid could play for less than 1,5€ an hour on a rainy day, even when I lived in Munich there were like 2 indoor playgrounds in a 50 km radius and they cost a fortune. They had them everywhere for dirt cheap. So, I’ll happily get off my high horse.
I remember going into cafés and things when I was a young man about 14 years old… You wouldn’t be able to see across a small room for the sheer fog bank of cigarette smoke.
We didn’t think anything of it
It still smells of automotive exhaust. So they might have idea after all.
Look at pictures of people in their 30s back in the 70s, and compare them to people in their 30s today. It’s a massive difference, I hypothesize that it’s the leaded gasoline and secondhand smoke that makes it although I’m not aware of any science to back that up.
Probably a lot of it was first hand smoke.
More stress, tbh. We’re starting to see it swing back, a lot of millennials look older than their Genx counterparts at the same age
There is a lot of science to back it up, but all of it is on the opposite direction (those things cause aging), and we can’t really tell if the aging we saw was caused by any of them or if there was something else going on.
it was the chaos demons
Some of it is also styles. If you came of age in the 1970s, then 50 years on, you probably dress and have your hair done like it’s the 1970s. We associate those styles with old people and then see the same styles in old photos, which makes the people in them look old.
That’s only a partial explanation, though. A lot of that stuff did age you faster.
I remember when I was a teenager working in restaurants during high school I’d come home and shower afterwards. when I’d wash my hair it’d reek of cigarette smoke because I’d spent the last 5-9 hours standing in a giant plume of it.
I picked up smoking in college, I wonder if that was a factor. Thankfully I quit, eventually
And it made about as much sense as having a pissing section in a public pool.
I remember in the early-mid 90’s going to pizza hut with my family to cash in one of those sweet book club free pizza stamps and the smoking section always being packed with other families. The other kids would be playing and having a fun time while all the adults enjoyed their refreshing delicious cigarettes while everyone ate. There was no real, “smoking or non-smoking” section. It’s was a smoke filled restaurant with the option to sit shoulder to shoulder with someone smoking a cig or being a few feet away from said smokers.
A smoking section in a bar is like a peeing section in a pool.
I’m old enough to remember the same things on airplanes.
At least the airplanes were designed to pull smoke downwards, which reduced transmission rates for covid.
Experienced this when I went to Barcelona a few years back. Lovely city, but stepping out into the street felt like stepping into a cigar bar.
I don’t mind it in the streets. I mean, as long as it’s outside it’s okay.
However, I remember a hotel in Spain where clients would be allowed to smoke indoors. It was hell.
Same experience in Paris a while ago. My sister was about to dig into her spaghetti when someones cigarette ash drifted onto it…
I tie it to Germany. I remember getting off the plane the first thing I got hit with was the smell of cigarette smoke. And then wandering through parks and seeing kids smoking with their parents.
You should go to Cologne (or I bet any other major city), now it’s weed smell everywhere 😂
One of the few things America has done unambiguously right is the strong anti-snoking campaigns. I think my mom is the only smoker I know anymore
It’s so good that most of the og tobacco barons are dead and don’t have much power, otherwise current admin would be introducing mandatory smoking right about now
I did say it was one of the few, and vaping did kinda take its place for a lot of young folk
Can’t you smoke indoors still in parts of America?
basically not in any public space, with rare exception.
There are still hotels with ‘smoking’ rooms in I think South Carolina and Kentucky at least, you definitely want to make sure you have a non-smoking room or you’ll be inhaling musty old tobacco smells the entire night, something I had made the mistake of once.
Laws vary state to state. I walked into a bar in rural Pennsylvania that had ash trays on the bar and the odor hit me in the face as soon as I walked in the door. Don’t miss that one bit. Someone told me it’s still legal in places that don’t serve food
Smoging was almost gone here too like 10 or so years ago. Now it seems like almost everyone is back to cigarettes. I haven’t been on a single date with a non smoker in probably 4 years. I know a guy who has a pretty stubborn g Form of cancer for years, but he would never stop smoking. Everyone is like: yeah it’s unhealthy and all, but i’m cool like that. I get that and i don’t care about your health, it’s gross and you are a walking littering machine. There has to be better ways to be unhealthy
