You didn’t. As a child you got sick a lot with respiratory illnesses and ear infections, and you went to school reeking of cigs. But you didn’t realize it because you were surrounded by it. The quality of what you ate was often not as good either, because your parents couldn’t taste their food. And we’re probably still dealing with the long term health effects without knowing it.
It’s also fun whe you have to scrape the nicotine stains off the windows and scrub the walls when you finally sell your parents home.
The epigenetic effects of this sort of damage take a couple generations to clear up. Gen alpha is probably the first one to widely grow up without these being a problem.
I was so thankful my grandparents’ house was sold to be torn down and rebuilt. There was zero chance that the house with windows NEVER open for 50+ years could have been cleaned or deoderized.
It’s also fun whe you have to scrape the nicotine stains off the windows and scrub the walls when you finally sell your parents home.
I recently bought my house. I thought it was an odd choice for the walls to be done in a pale yellow color, It was only when I started redecorating that I realized it was actually white paint. It also explains why all the rooms in the house have the same carpet, their estate agent probably made them change the carpet when they sold the house because it’s brand new, and the cheapest option.
You grew up in it and didn’t notice.
But after the bans the first thing that stood out is you don’t need to bleach every piece of fabric you took outside every day. The first time I went out, woke up the next day and my clothes didn’t smell… you know, smoky I was very confused. Up until that point I assumed that was just what happened to dirty clothes, I didn’t realize it was all the cigarettes.
one of the first times I noticed was when it was banned on flights
There’s a local bowling alley I went to as a kid. I didn’t go back until 2-3 years after the indoor cigarette ban. Once I went in I immediately said “Something’s different…”
Then someone said there’s no more smoke, that was my Aha! moment.
My wife tells me that when she used to go clubbing she would come home with burn marks/holes in her dresses all the time.
Got one on my brand new t-shirt I had bought with my student loan money… That was fucking annoying.
Being a non-smoker back then was a giant pain-in-the-ass at any workplace too because any smoker could and would take a break for a cigarette once an hour and then so would the manager and they’d get to be buddies but if you were known as a non-smoker you didn’t get a break because you “didn’t need one” I knew dozens of people, especially in healthcare, who took up smoking because that was the time to be social with each other and the managers.
The hospital I worked at caught a LOT of flak when they started making people clock in and out for smoke breaks in the early 2000s. The smokers complained they only took a couple breaks a day for only a few minutes. Within the first month they found out people spent over half their days on smoke breaks.
Lul that happens in my office but it’s small and they either all know each other or are related. I take desk breaks and because I’m the unofficial office IT nobody says anything. Someone tried once, Im magically never available to help them with IT stuff. Word spreads around this office. Even the owner of the company an office over doesn’t say anything if he sees me on my phone at my desk. I know my worth, they know my worth.
Smokers getting better chances at promotion because they smoked with the bosses was standard when I started working.
Yeah, maybe we worked at the same place!
This was an issue in the military too. The smokers would take their smoking breaks. So I started taking non-smoker breaks. lol
My husband tried to take an “apple break” when he was in the air force and his boss laughed at him. He just took up smoking again after that so that he could take the break.
When I quit smoking I refused to quit my breaks. It was just a shop, so it was a solo break, I would take a stick of incense and sit outside while it burned for five minutes. This was pre-smartphone and it was really peaceful.
Wow. Dozens of people started smoking to be outside with the smokers? That’s crazy. That must have been during the denial phase in smoking’s history.
It still happens. Many jobs allow smokers an hourly or more frequent break, but expect non smokers to keep at it. The result is many people starting just to get the same break they should give everyone.
Dozens of the people I’ve known personally and most of this was in the 90s and early 2000s. I was part of the “smoke free” class of 2000 and the anti-smoking education started in Kindergarten for us. Imagine dozens of 5 year olds crying as their teachers explained with songs and videos how the adults in our lives were all going to die horrible deaths and it was up to us kids to educate them and help them quit. In school, at least twice a year. Yet by the time we reached the workforce, smoking was still a big part of the working culture and I watched pretty much everyone I knew with a full time job take up smoking at one point or another.
Growing up in the 1960s, my father was a chainsmoker. I never noticed. It was the water that little fish me swam in.
He quit when I was, I dunno, maybe 12 or 13. Suddenly, I noticed tobacco smoke when I encountered it, and it was revolting. I deeply resented having to work in an office in the 1980s that allowed smoking. I deeply resented restaurants with “smoking sections” that were just a half-wall separating me and smokers. I hated flying, with the stench from the “smoking section” filling my air.
How did I survive? Resentfully.
I grew up in the 80’s / early 90s when smoking indoors was still common (restaurants, buses, etc). You just kind of got used to it.
Eventually I started smoking, and it was less of a bother 😆 (have since quit).
The thing I never could figure out, even as a smoker, was how people smoked in a car with the windows rolled up. It was unbearable even being the one smoking. Even in the dead of winter and negative one million degrees outside, I always had to have a window cracked.
I live in a country where there are still bars where you can legally smoke indoors. One of my favourite bars is like that even though I am a non-smoker. I always feel like I can burn all my clothes after an evening there. And the hangovers are way worse.
Going on a long car trip in winter as a kid sucked so hard. Parents are in the front seats, you’re in the back. They’re smoking more often than normal because of boredom. You’re freezing your ass off because they’re cracking the window, and the smoke is awful.
Same here. My Dad was a smoker and I remember sitting on the top deck of buses with him whilst he smoked. Can’t remember ever noticing the smell really. I started smoking myself at 15. Quit about 10 years later. Now I can smell it so clearly. I can tell if someone is a smoker as soon as I get anywhere near them.
Ask my asthma. I dunno if there’s direct causation but being exposed to cigarette smoke from infancy damn sure didn’t help.
Same dude. I don’t know about you but I also had sinus and ear infections out the ass growing up, which I don’t know for sure was related but it sure seems like it would be.
Absolutely. I was constantly sick. Eventually had tubes placed in my ears and apparently I almost died on the operating table during my tonsillectomy. Fun times!
My sister and I were wee little ones who one week brought home scads of stuff given to us by our school from the American Cancer society. We went running up to our dad screaming “We don’t want you to die daddy!” with all that childish exuberance, and he quit cold turkey the next day.
There’s something very wholesome about the thing you asked of him that you thought was simple (“just stop”) and the mountain he moved to give you want you asked for.
You should BOTH be very proud that he did that. Quitting smoking can be very difficult.
Ha, I remember being a kid. I would be with my parents at a campground all Summer. We had a fairly small trailer. I remember one night there was a NFL(Patriots) game on and my parents and another couple were in the trailer watching. There was so much smoke that I felt like I was going to die.
I ended up screaming at them all. I think they were actually shocked at how angry and loud I screamed. They didn’t say a word. Turned off the TV, took a few things and left the trailer. They even made sure to keep the door open so the air would vent through the screen door.
My father died of lung cancer less than 10 years later in '89.
I think one thing a lot of people don’t know now is that back then there was a WHOLE LOT of denial about the detrimental effects of smoking. I think this was mostly the tobacco industry’s propaganda, but it worked. I remember talking with someone in the 90s that had some sort of cancer and had been a smoker most of his life. “No way to know if it was the cigarettes” that caused the cancer, he told me.
We are much, much more aware of the downsides of smoking now. The cat is out of the bag.
Your logic is why I give people in generations before me a bit of a pass. I’m born in '87 and I was alive to remember smoking in cars and restaurants at least, and so if you’re older than me, you may have been told it was okay. But if you’re my age or younger, we have had it slammed into our heads since youth that smoking kills, and so when I see you smoking a cigarette it just hits a little different than our older counterparts.
I appreciate your reasoned approach.
One of the ingredients is how bloody emotional of an addiction it is. You feel personally challenged if somebody berates your behavior. I know, in a quite rational human being, but I’d feel troubled by posts and papers on the downsides of the addiction.
When you stop you stay to see and smell it too. I want to think it stinks, but somehow somewhere it does still smell nice. I know for a fact that even though I’m through all this, is fall for it again immediately.
It’s such a deep seated thing, if you never had addiction it’s hard to grasp.
You are talking to the survivors.
I grew up in a small town, and when I was 17, I signed up for the volunteer fire department in town. Part of the in-processing was getting a chest x-ray so they knew how fucked your lungs were before any exposure related to the position. Nurse asked me how much I smoked and thought I was lying when I (truthfully) said I didn’t. She said my lungs looked like I’d been smoking at least a pack a day for at least a year.
My mom and every step-dad smoked like chimneys, spent a lot of my childhood in bars when smoking indoors was still legal. I don’t know if the nurse was exaggerating the results, and I don’t have a copy of the x-ray from back then. I also picked up the habit myself around 20 in the military and smoked a pack to 2 a day until we found out my wife was pregnant with our first kid. We both quit cold turkey that day. I assume I’ll have lung or skin cancer at some point between all that childhood exposure, the damage I did to myself smoking for a decade, the aircraft fumes, and burn pit exposure from the military…and we didn’t worry about sunscreen like we should have in the 80s/90s either.
Trent Crimm, The Independent. I have a question, how many step dads did you had?
Childhood asthma, unfortunately. I was born in 1982 and basically everyone smoked everywhere here in the Netherlands. If you had a birthday, you couldn’t see across the room due to the smoke.
Because of it I had childhood asthma, which cleared up immediately when my parents stopped smoking. In the early 90’s, things got a lot better with smoke-free environments. We eventually got full on smoking bans, thank god. As far as I can tell, it didn’t do any permanent damage.
I still absolutely HATE smokers and smoking. It is and was an antisocial thing and children should never have been exposed to it like we were.
I thought smoking was still very common in Europe?
Well, Europe is a big place. The percentage of smokers differs from country to country, as well as the anti-smoking legislation and when that was introduced.
In the Netherlands, you cannot smoke in the workplace, restaurants, cinema, on public transport, near a hospital, etc. Sale of tobacco products is illegal to anyone under 18 and we’ve banned things like flavoured vapes.
Because of all these measures, ‘only’ 19 percent of the Dutch population 15 and older smokes, with people lower on the socio-economic ladder smoking more frequently. That’s below the European average of 19.7 percent.
Now, compare that to other countries like France (22 percent), Spain (23 percent) and Bulgaria (28 percent).
Now, those countries have anti-smoking legislation as well. But because they had statistically higher numbers of smokers, it takes longer to see the overall effect.
So depending on where you are in Europe, your perception of smoking habits could vary wildly.
Interesting. Years ago before I quit I rolled my own and the best lose tobacco I could find in the States was Dutch.
Funny how things change.
Well we are proud of Dutch manufacturing in general. We like to make good products, even if they might be bad for you: for decades, we had the best weed in terms of THC content. And the Netherlands is also a highly regarded global producer of XTC pills and amphetamines. There’s only so many tulips you can export…
So yes, loose tobacco is one of our fine export products. We Dutch also loved it; it was really popular to use in joints (see: Dutch weed) and rolling your own cigarettes tended to be cheaper than buying packs (we Dutch are notoriously cheap). These days people prefer a vape, or pure joint. And with smoking in general on the decline, loose tobacco is a rare sight here these days.
It really sucked when people could smoke anywhere. I remember so many times when I was at a restaurant just starting into a nice meal and suddenly all I could smell or taste was cigarette (or cigar) smoke. It was gross.
I also remember when airlines had a smoking section, which was usually the back several rows. I remember asking for a seat in the non-smoking section, and the one I got was one row in front of the smoking section; there was probably more smoke there than in the last row of the smoking section.
You washed your clothes a lot. And even worse for girls with long hair.
You would skip restaurants during busy times.
Sometimes you would carry an extra jacket in your car trunk to put on when going into a smokey place, so you could take it off and hopefully not have too much smoke smell on you if you weren’t going to shower soon.
My family smoked like chimneys. I closed myself in my bedroom and avoided un-necessary contact.
Great grandmother got emphysema and died.
Great grandfather got throat cancer, a tracheotomy, and died.
Grandfather got lung cancer and died.
Mom got cancer and survived.
Dad had a massive heart attack and died.My parents only smoked when they had company at home and it was still so dusgusting. Not the smoke itself necessarily, but the morning after when the whole house smelled like old ashtray.
I had a neighbour growing up who would smoke like a crazy person. Her house was quite literally yellow on the insinde. Surprisingly she lived to be almost 70.There are some that manage to make it a long life with what most would have issues with (I.e. a lifetime of smoking.) A good friend died recently and he made it to what I would consider a long life. Was able to retire and stay active for years. Got diagnosed with cancer, two weeks later dead after the first chemo therapy. I’m very happy he didn’t live a much longer life - the pain that would have put him in would have been unbearable, and given how quickly he passed in guessing the cancer was fairly advanced…
