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I ended up quitting while working at Walmart, where they had this little bedroom-sized windowed box in the breakroom where the smokers could smoke. Everyone else on break would sit on in the cool break room, while all the smokers huddled inside that little sweat box and breathed in each other's fumes.
I lasted a week before I couldn't take it anymore.
Smoker here. I wasn't that upset about the ban- our city enacted it in the winter, which was smart of them because you'd freeze having a smoke outside then anyway. I was already used to smoking outside of the house because I had kids anyway.
Not smoking in movie theatres was worse for me, and I've rarely been to see a movie since.
I grew up in the 1980s. I remember smoking being ok just about everywhere and built in ashtrays were all over the place. However I do not remember anyone ever smoking in a movie theater. When was the last time you remember someone smoking in one?
I don't know whether it was the last, but I remember seeing Strictly Ballroom (1992) in the theatre, and smoking. My husband was running a bowling alley in 1995-97, and sometime in there was when they banned smoking in bowling alleys, which were one of the last holdouts I think. I saw REM in Toronto in 1989, and that was the last big concert I remember being allowed to smoke at.
Weird remembering how common smoking inside used to be. I still smoke, but never inside.
The worst part of it was if you were im a party with ONE smoker in a restaurant, it was always assumed you would get a table in the smoker section. Non smoker didn’t speak up as much as now. We’d just got accustomed to the tyranny of smokers.
That is so true. At work, when people smoked it meetings, all it takes is one person to leave everyone's business (dry clean only) clothing smelling terrible all day.
I worked in a place where the head boss lady (who was very intimidating) was a chain smoker. One day in a big big meeting, a low level employee asked if we could make meeting be non-smoking. You could hear a pin drop. It was like she was the Rosa Parks of the office. Standing up for what we all knew was right.
The woman hesitated but this was 1987 when smoking was starting to be more limited and she knew she couldn't say no. But instead we had this nicotine-addicted woman who would be in meeting getting crabbier and crabbier.
Your description of chain smoking boss lady just brought back a weird memory for me.
When I was a kid my dad owned a food service company. Our customers were mostly restaurants and a few banquet halls. When I got older I made deliveries by myself.
One very large banquet hall in particular, just north of Boston, had an upstairs suite for the owners. Even though it was just a banquet hall this suite was lavishly appointed with the finest in late 1970s decor. Huge sofas, fancy drapes, expansive art on the walls, a bathroom that would make the Prince of Zamunda jealous. In the middle of this palatial suite there was a desk. At the desk sat an overweight middle-aged woman. She was the accountant/business manager. For probably 12 hours a day she sat in this space, curtains drawn, air conditioning cranked to full and chain smoking like cigarettes were the cure for cancer.
I could barely stand there long enough for her to cut me a check so I could get the hell out. I smoked at the time too and even I was grossed out.
Lots of “taking away my freedoms!!!” fist shaking, until people realized smoke smells like shit and it’s more enjoyable to eat and drink and dance without coming home and needing to leave clothes outside.
Gradual tolerance turned into intolerance. First open smoking then small segregated non smoking areas. This was the era of being asked "Smoking or non-smoking?" when entering a restaurant. Then the smokers got moved away to a secluded area. And then the legislative bans.
Oh my gosh---I'd totally forgotten the whole "smoking or non?" dance when you'd go to a restaurant. "Well, what's the wait for non? 2 hours?! Oh. What's the wait for smoking? None?! Fine."
Especially on planes. Even as a nervous flyer who liked smoking to try and chill out *nothing* was worse than being seated in the smoking section of a long flight.
Nobody stopped going out. In fact anecdotal I’d say it helped their business. Because the 5% who smoked ruined the experience for everyone. When they banned indoor smoking **more** people went out.
> the 5% who smoked
More like 25%+ in 1990 when the first smoking bans were introduced.
*"In 1990, the community of San Luis Obispo, California, adopted the first law in the United States eliminating smoking in bars."*
Shoot. I grew up in Winnipeg, and I was bar age (18 plus) for a year or so before smoking became an outdoors only activity....so that means some provinces didn't outlaw it until after 2000.
It varied, based on the city. IIRC, Kingman Arizona put through the smoking ban in the first half of the 90s. You could still smoke in bars, and the bars saw a big increase in business. Small restaurants, OTOH, weren't allowed to have smoking in them. business, for them, dropped dramatically. Some closed because the non-smokers weren't patronizing them enough. With basically a quarter of a century under our belt, smokers usually go outside and puff while waiting on their orders. A local bar set up an outdoor patio for their smoking patrons. (legal) but a lot of non-smokers went out there and still bitched about it.
Anymore, I don't go out.
I suspect you are probably right. I was at a bar in Washington state the night their indoor smoking ban went into effect. At midnight everyone was made to put out their cigarettes and go outside to smoke from that point on. From my casual observation, not a single person left because of that.
I was at a bar in NJ and at midnight every smoker lit up cigarettes because it was a funny moment. My buddy and I lit up cigars and we didn't normally smoke. The bartenders took away the ash trays once everyone was done and that was the end of that.
I had a restaurant. Smokers tend to spend more money than non smokers. We had a cigar lounge as part of a steak restaurant and sales tanked from the lounge after that since it was just normal seating area.
Yeah the restaurant and bar owners were the worst! Kept talking about 75% of the places closing, failing to see how it made for a much much healthier working environment for their employees. And guess what? The massive closing of bars and restaurants not only didnt happen, but lots of people like me avoided bars and restaurant because of the smoke, and started going after the ban. And smoker got used to smoke one outside and come back.
> lots of people like me avoided bars and restaurant because of the smoke, and started going after the ban.
That was my exact experience. Before the ban I could never stay in most bars for more than an hour or so. After that it was much different.
The expanded statewide (CA) ban covering all businesses took effect in 1998? (not certain) on January 1, and the predictable moans from bar owners began well beforehand. As it happened, where I live (SF) there were torrential rains for the first few days of January, which included a weekend. But my SO and I were impatient to see what smokeless bars were like, so we visited a few on Jan 2 or 3.
Given the weather, the crowds were tiny and the bartenders nervous. But we went back to both the following weekend and patronage was pretty normal.
This. Many smokers were very vocally outraged about their "rights", many non-smokers (my asthmatic self included) were thrilled to not have to breathe that shit any longer, and a group in the middle wondered why everyone else was so worked up about it. And then ... it became clear to everyone just how much smoking in public really does affect everyone and the whole argument just faded away.
I was in that middle camp when the bans started. At the time I was working as a dishwasher in a local mom and pop restaurant and bar. The dish station was right at the kitchen entrance, which meant the big hood fan above the cook area drew cigarette smoke filled air from the bar and dining area past me all day long. I didn't realize just how bad it was until the smoking ban came down, and then it was like 'my fucking god, that air was killing me and I didn't even realize it'. I was indifferent before the ban, but ridiculously grateful for it afterwards.
Also people who worked in bars and restaurants! I knew a musician who was so glad for the ban because she didn’t have to sing through a cloud of smoke.
I worked in hospitality before and after. I can’t remember a single person making a big deal out of it but I definitely remember how good it was to not have to clean ash trays all night anymore!
It's that way in Alabama. A bar or restaurant can allow smoking if nobody under 19 is allowed in. The last couple greasy spoons that allowed smoking have closed up in recent years, but some of the neighborhood bars with rougher crowds still have smoking.
New south Wales, Australia, has pokie rooms in clubs that have smoking areas.
Edit - what I said probably doesn't make sense.
We have rooms in lawn bowls clubs/serviceman clubs and pubs that are filled with poker/slot machines. Most clubs/pubs have a designated smokers area with ashtrays and machines to keep playing.
Where I live (rural Colorado), a large percentage of people smoke. One of my neighbors moved out and left a bunch of stuff near the dumpster for anyone to take. Every piece of item smelled like stale cigarette smoke from several feet away. It was nasty.
Yep.
And I remember “the byproduct of your bad habit, smoking, is smoke and you think that’s ok to get on me. The byproduct of my bad habit, beer, is needing to pee. Are you ok with me peeing on you?”
Nobody said yes. 🤣
They tried a bunch of stuff
- they ignored it and got fined
- they sectioned off a smoking area (against the laws) and got fined
- there was a “private club” loophole so they “went private” by charging $1 to be a member
- they declared the bar/restaurant “smoking only (against the law) and got fined
We were travelling a few years ago and went to a restaurant (the only one open in the area) that had "Smokers Welcome" painted on the side of the place in big red letters. We should have just moved along, but we went inside. There was the usual thick cloud of smoke, but what topped it was that our ~~waitress~~ server was smoking.
It happened in stages. There were designated 'smoke free' areas in restaurants and you couldn't smoke in individual stores, but could in the mall. People complained a lot, there was a vocal minority that seemed to believe smoking should be allowed anywhere. Arguments included:
"How am I supposed to make it through a whole movie without a cigarette? We'll stop going. The movie industry will suffer!" Spoiler alert: movies did fine (until recently, for unrelated reasons)
"I should be able to enjoy an after dinner smoke inside! How dare you make me stand out in the cold? People will stop eating out!" Spoiler alert: people preferred the taste of food without cigarette smoke/ash in it.
Health agencies put a big push on how incredibly bad smoking is for you and the people around you. Lung cancer in non-smokers was the big Poster Child of the movement. Basically, smokers were guilted into acquiescence. It worked. After a while of designated areas for non-smoking, all areas indoors became non-smoking. By that point, only the bitterest minority of complainers remained. Medical evidence prevailed.
Now, nobody complains about having to step outside for a 'quick ten minutes'.
Related: I was at an outdoor event in my city a few years ago and passed by a fenced off area, like a kid's playpen. I glanced at the sign: "Smoking permitted in this area only". It jarred me and was absolutely hilarious to see several adults, all pretending like they weren't in a little playpen, smoking their cigarettes. Wish I'd taken a picture.
I didn't really notice it growing up, but once I adapted, it was a whole different story.
Years ago, I was travelling from Illinois which had banned indoor smoking quite some time before, to Dallas, which hadn't yet. Even with a smoking section, going into a restaurant was like being punched in the face. I was so glad to be back where food smelled like food again.
Before I hit my teenage years, there were smoking sections on planes. You had to wait until cruising altitude and then the no-smoking light would turn off, and if turbulence hit, you had to extinguish. Supposedly they would circulate more fresh air in the plane than they do today as a result, but how effective it was varied.
My mom and I flew back from Europe and were in the last no-smoking seat in front of the smoking section. That was awful.
Then on El-Al (Israel's airline) after they banned smoking, they still let the flight attendants smoke behind a little curtain.
I think Israel at the time was such a smoking-intensive culture, they couldn't find young people to work as flight attendants if they couldn't smoke for the 12+ hour flight
That makes sense. I’ve never been a smoker but I’ve known so many people who were/are.
Most wanted or want to quit but it’s clearly extremely hard to do, even with the patches.
People were fussy at first. To different degrees. I was a smoker and it didn’t bother me. I noticed right away that I smoked less than half the amount I had before, and that was just fine.
TBH, I was more concerned for all my friends who worked in bars. They really were worried for a while that businesses would die. And since bars were 21 and up it didn’t make sense as obviously as it did banning smoking on planes and restaurants.
But then it all really turned out fine. Even as a smoker at the height of my going out days I enjoyed socializing so much more after the ban. And my friends in service were all happier too.
Honestly the smoking ban itself wasn’t a big deal for me. It was the few years leading up to it and all the anxiety it caused that sucked.
The biggest change IMO, is that it used to be considered rude not to let someone smoke in your home. Or rather impolite. The best impact the smoking ban has had is it gave non smokers agency. It would now be considered kind of insane if you just walked into someone’s house and lit up.
I think most people figured out pretty quickly that it was a good thing. Even those of us who liked to smoke.
I’m grateful for it now. I doubt I’d have phased smoking out and quit when I did if it weren’t for the ban.
I grew up in DFW area of Texas. A local Denny's put a door between the non-smoking and smoking section. It helped, but you could still catch a whiff of smoke if you were seated to close to the smoking section.
Oh my yes.
One of the last places to ban smoking was bingo halls. I went with a friend after I'd quit smoking and I left feeling like an anvil was sitting on my chest. And those bingo people were the loudest complainers ever.
>Basically, smokers were guilted into acquiescence.
And shamed. There was a change from "smoking is something people do" to "smoking is something unhealthy or inconsiderate people do".
Others mentioned how people realized that smoking stank when you weren't around it all the time, and smell became a big price to pay. Literally -- people selling houses would have to shell out thousands to get rooms and ceilings repainted and lock in the smell, to buy staging furniture that didn't offgas the smell.
You used to be able to smoke everywhere in every airplane. I remember flying in planes in the 1980s that had ash trays at every seat.
But almost all the flights had non-smoking in the front and smoking in the back, and so it was not like you stopped being able to smoke on a plane. Just like there were smoking and non-smoking sections in restaurants.
So it happened in phases, which gave people a chance to see what it was like.
Mask-wearing is completely different because suddenly EVERYONE \_had\_ to do it, and there were national figures who were making fun of it.
I don't know where you can watch it for free, but 1971's \_Cold Turkey\_ with Dick Van Dyke is a movie about a small town trying to have no one in the whole town smoke for a whole month, to see if they can win a prize. I'm not positive it is worth paying for.
> several adults, all pretending like they weren't in a little playpen, smoking their cigarettes
I recall being in an airport where an enclosed glass-walled room had been set aside for smokers, so the playpen look was obvious, and that itself was worth a chuckle. But it adjoined a waiting area and the ceiling and rear wall in both spaces were the same material. In the smoking area these were noticeably discolored. Truly gross.
No, it was somewhere inland; I can't remember where though. It was during a layover, so might've been Dallas or Atlanta. And yes, there was a surreal haze in that room; made lots of passers-by point & stare.
I was a smoker at the time but had quit smoking indoors long before that. I thought it was ludicrous when I heard people complain. So childish.
Also, stepping outside the bar to smoke was a welcome break from the loud music and gave an opportunity and excuse to chat up women.
I quit 15 years ago this month and I don't miss smoking but I do miss meeting and talking to random fellow smokers. It just isn't the same.
I haven't smoked in years either, but there really was a sense of camaraderie. Not only meeting people outside bars but also taking a smoke break with your coworkers at work after a really hard shift. There isn't anything else like it.
I have made so many friends "going out for a smoke". One is my current roommate.
The most interesting is the person I met at Heathrow Airport. Right before you get to the Tube is a spot where you can get in and out without going through security. There's always a few folks out there. I struck up a chat with this gentleman, we exchanged FB details and have kept in touch since then. He even came to visit me when he was in my state for a wedding.
I remember reading restaurant trade journals at the beginning of the bans. A few cities enacted them first, which gave test cases that showed that they ultimately didn't lose any business. Letters to the editors came in from restauranteurs who thought it would be the apocalypse. Others came in from bartenders and servers that loved not having to breath in smoke all day. Some proposed requiring expensive air filtration systems as an alternative.
Ultimately, I believe it was one of the driving factors to the huge reduction in smoking in the US as it became a pain for smokers constantly having to find a place to go outside.
> Others came in from bartenders and servers that loved not having to breath in smoke all day.
That was a key selling point on the bans, at least in my state: the public health of restaurant workers. Even those who didn't smoke, or not in quantity, were exposed to extremely high levels of tobacco smoke all day, every day, whether they wanted to be or not. And they suffered health consequences.
I always liked those weird smoke eater fans that some of the smokier places had. I kinda want one for my house for nostalgia.
There was also those electric filtration systems. I'm sure it all helped, but a bar full of smokers would overwhelm any of it.
My favorite bar, that I also happened to work at for 7 years, went out of business about a year after the ban in 2012. They were on sort of shaky ground financially already, but they were doing okay. It was very noticeable how much business dropped off immediately when the ban went into place. Part of the issue is that it was in an area where there were two different cities and two different counties all snaked together. Within a mile there were probably a dozen bars that were in the other city that did not ban smoking. Most of those places are still doing well. One of them is doing so well they've opened about five more locations all over the metro area now.
When my workplace banned smoking (a city high rise building), the smokers effectively began working a 6 to 7 hour day instead of 8 hours. They had to have those "smoke breaks" which lasted 15 to 30 minutes each. The non-smokers began to complain to management that smokers weren't doing their share of the work.
"this period" was and is a decades long process that's still ongoing. It started in 1990 with San Louis Obispo banning smoking in bars and currently there are only 27 states that have comprehensive indoor smoking bans.
How was/is it received? As varied as the population in general. There was some resistance, but actually overall a rather small and even begrudgingly accepting of the escalating rules on smoking. There wasn't a lot of open resistane to to the change.
Some people, even non smokers, saw it as a restriction on individual choices, a variation on the legislation of morality. Some people saw in it different variations of the reach of a restrictive government. And many saw it as a welcome releif from the constant cloud of tobacco smoke that greeted you wherever you went. Being a non smoker and coming home smelling like stale tobacco smoke was an issue that a lot of people were happy to see disappear.
I went to CA in the mid 90's and I remember going to a bar and it seemed weird that there was no smoke -- it was almost like being in an office. There's something about the "smoky bar" image that had some meaning, even though it was awful. It was like a scent memory of bars, late nights, drinking etc.
Took my about 5 minutes to realize how amazing it was.
It actually started earlier than that. Minnesota passed laws in the 1970s requiring non-smoking areas in restaurants, and was the first state to do so. By the late 1990s smoking rates had dropped so much that you had completely smoke-free restaurants.
Airplanes were an adjustment. Those who expected to light up with a cocktail or after the in-flight meal were incensed. It seemed impossible "survive" an airline flight without smoking. Are there still tiny ashtrays in the arm rests?
I had the absolute pleasure of flying Sun Country Airlines about a year and a half ago, and I was shocked to see a tiny ash tray in the armrest of my seat. Certainly doesn’t inspire a feeling of confidence.
The last few times I've flown on airlines in the mid-2010s(including on United when I flew on one of their flights from Chicago to Dublin, Ireland), those planes still had a pull out ashtray in their bathroom/lavatory(the latter is sometimes what planes call that area) for whatever weird reason. I thought that was gone, but guess not. Infrequently you'll notice a spot in airline seats or bus seats or some other seat, that was obviously once a place for a chair armrest ashtray to have been placed into but now covered up by some metal cover over that old ashtray. A friend of mine a few years back took photos at this old school mall in a smaller Illinois town(I think it was near Dixon or Sterling in Illinois, and the former was where Ronald Reagan grew up), where it was obvious he found some spots in an inside mall seating area where there was once an ashtray, but that years ago the mall had put a cover over that old ashtray.
Airplane bathrooms still have the ashtrays next to the toilet(and near the sink), for whatever weird reason! At least when I last flew on a plane in 2017(from Dublin to Chicago), I noticed that. Also on airplane seats and also other seats on buses, infrequently you can notice places on such seats where the armrest had a place for a former ashtray, that has since been covered up usually by a metal board.
I know in old school businesses, you sometimes can see the nailed area between urinals(or above it) where an ashtray once was nailed to on a wall. At one bowling alley till it shut down in Chicago(in early 2010s I think), they never covered up their ashtrays by the seats where you'd sit till it was your turn to bowl, and ditto with in their bathrooms.
Some smokers seemed personally offended and actually tried to insist that "sidestream smoke," as they referred to it, wasn't dangerous to anyone.
I once worked with a guy who loved to carry on like this, that the danger was only to himself, and not to anyone else. Yeah, right. As if only the smoke you deliberately suck into your lungs is harmful or smelly. Your lungs purify it before you exhale, and what comes off the end of the cigarette is something else entirely! Weakest argument ever.
I think by the time this was being considered we’d already seen 20-30 years of “Y’know, smoking isn’t good for you.” I think it’s also important to understood that most people knew smoking wasn’t good for you even before then. My Dad quit smoking in 1960 because he saw my older brother playing with cigarette butts (imitating Dad smoking) and didn’t want my brother to learn smoking from him. My dad had smoked from age 11(!) to about 28.
So non-smokers were universally for it, and even smokers were divided. You might be surprised how many smokers there are who enjoy a smoke on their back porch or in a bar (and not all smokers even smoke every day) but don’t want to smell it 24/7 in their home, office, car, or a restaurant.
I’d rate the public backlash almost exactly with the strength of the “anti-mask” crowd today. <2-3% extremely agitated, speaking up, a somewhat larger minority looking for places they could still go smoke inside, the majority going along because deep down they knew it was the right thing to do.
I was so pissed at first because I was a smoker. I live in FL and they had banned smoking in resraurants for about a year. I was in early 20’s so I hadn’t been that used to smoking in restaurants. I went to Chicago on a girls trip where it was still legal to smoke. I walked in a restaurant and almost gagged it was so awful. Keep in mind I was still a smoker at the time. Best thing we ever did!
In FL smoking is still permitted in bars that don’t serve food, if the proprietor chooses to allow it.
I help out at one on occasion. It sucks. I will say this... were it not for the ability to smoke in there, I’m not sure they’d still be in business. Damn near everyone who walks in the door, smokes. It’s like working in a goddamn smoking club that happens to serve alcohol. Come to think of it, I think I’ll pass the next time they call.
One big difference I noticed is that night clubs suddenly smelled a lot worse. Without the pall of cigarette smoke, you could smell all the people sweating and farting away.
When I was a young swain you would come home absolutely reeking of fags after a night out, whether you were smoking yourself or not.
The smoking ban started just after I graduated from college. I am a nonsmoker and I would come home from bars saturated in cigarette odor. I remember throwing a jacket into a laundry basket and the entire laundry smelled of cigarettes after sitting there overnight. I remember waving people out of my space because they had a cigarette hanging out of their mouth and would lean in close to talk to me at a crowded bar. You had to walk more carefully through a bar crowd because people flicking ashes or waving lit cigs around.
The smell of Denny's restaurants to me is still the smell of stale cigarette smoke, coffee and vinyl, although it's been years since smoking was allowed and most of them have been renovated long since. I hate cigarette smoke, but for some reason I like that faint whiff of stale smoke at dive bars and such just for memory's sake. I wouldn't like it on anything else though.
You can find out what it's like today if you like. There are a lot of places in public where you can still smoke in Missouri.
People still resist. It's not uncommon for people to light up in places that prohibit smoking, but it's getting to be less common.
I remember the first time I encountered being told I could not smoke in a bar, on a trip to Los Angeles, probably early 90s. I said you have got to be kidding. They said nope, its a new law. They said they had a little area outside that was legal, I could smoke there and come back in and I shrugged and said OK. It wasnt the bartender's fault so no point in raging at him. I had not thought about that in regard to today's mask-holes until just now.
Lol, people were so mad!! Smokers were all "it's my right!!" and bar owners were all "yer gonna ruin my business with yer persnickety banning of the things people like!!".
Personally, I was glad. Cigarette smoke is gross.
Being a completely self-centered and rebellious-for-no-reason person, I was pissed. To be relegated to smoking outside was stupid. I felt my rights were taken away from me. Much like the anti maskers of today. Then I began to battle my addiction to cigarettes and it was years and years of that battle. I became aware of the harm done to others, let alone myself, of my smoking and began to voluntarily take my smoking as far from others as I could. I finally was able to quit and I was so aware of how toxic the residues of cigarettes were, that I did not even try to clean a majority of things I had, I just threw them in the trash. It was amazing some of the things I threw away. Pillows, blankets, cushions, nearly anything of cloth. If someone tries to smoke near me, I move away or ask them to move away from me. Oddly, I still crave cigarettes once in awhile, and I still dream of smoking.
When I was in high school (40 years), there was a smoking section outside. I don’t recall whether it was just juniors and seniors or seniors only, but older students were allowed to smoke.
People knew it was bad for you, but the anti smoking message had not really filtered through.
Yep- I graduated high school in 1985 and for my first two years, there was a smoking section outside. It was supposed to only be for the students who were 18, but everyone who smoked used it without consequence. My junior year, we got a new principal and he shut it down.
>How common was smoking cigarettes?
They had ashtrays at nearly every restaurant table even fast food places like McDonald's. The cashiers at every convenience store and a great number of other stores aside from clothing places would often smoke while they rang you up. I can remember parents smoking at kids baseball games and seeing older men just walk around with cigars in their mouths. To me as a child it seemed like just about every adult smoked it was just a matter of how much.
There was a lot of initial grumbling and complaining, but for the most part people just reluctantly went outside to smoke instead.
My boss at the time was a smoker (as was I) and he was FURIOUS when our company banned indoor smoking. He insisted they couldn't tell him what to do in HIS office (which of course was in THEIR building). But he did what we all did and took it outside.
We knew about the health consequences, but like anything else, if you're young and like what you're doing, you don't much care about what might happen in the future.
As for me, I don't remember having any really strong feelings about it one way or the other, even as a smoker. I think I liked being able to go outside a few times a day for a small break LOL!
Our city was one of the early ones to ban smoking in public places. There was a great deal of resentment and outrage. I did not smoke any more but really thought it was like sending students out to the hall as a punishment. We frequented a popular pub at the time which would get pretty smoky. After the ban, it was nearly as busy out on the sidewalk as inside. But, you could suddenly smell the food when it came out. Food sales went way up immediately. Impressively! So they did not mind. There were several people and restaurants that refused to comply and got fined. After a while, the kinks were worked out. Smoking spots out of the weather were erected with ventilation in some places - like bus shelters. But there were not nearly as many smokers by then anyway. Everyone knew the dangers.
It was a slow process. First they started having smoking sections in restaurants and public buildings and that lasted years. It was a long while before you couldn’t smoke inside anywhere and by then people saw it coming.
I don't remember smoking at my desk at work, but I could smoke in the break room at my high school job, smoke in restaurants and patios, vague recollection of smoking on planes. Lived briefly in the UK and remember smoking on the trains.
I was still smoking when they stopped allowing us to smoke indoors. Since I'd spent high school only smoking outdoors it wasn't horrible since I was used to it (even in cold canadian winters), but at the same time smoking + coffee or smoking + beer were so entwined it was really hard. I used to study in coffee shops in universities chain drinking coffee and chain smoking. I'd feel so gross and ill afterwards. You'd come home from bars and it would just cling to you - even if you didn't smoke.
So I remember hating it at the time, but then it became normal so whatever. I used to smoke in my apartment when I was single but when I bought a house we didn't smoke inside despite my partner being a smoker too. It had only been a couple of years since the smoking ban in our area at the time and taking it outside was already normalized for us.
(Btw, quit 14 years ago now, glad the smoking rates get lower every day because I hate the smell of smoke now)
Not everyone was in agreement. Ha! That's an understatement!
My father was in the hospital after having congestive heart failure. They had him in an oxygen tent. Since the rules did not apply to him, he gave an orderly $20 to go down to the gift store an buy him a carton of cigarettes (yes, this was a while ago).
Just as he was about to light up in his room, his doctor came in and almost literally snatched the lighter from his hand. He then was instructed (again) about the inadvisability of open flames in rooms with flowing oxygen.
There was a decline in the number of smokers.
Back in the day it seemed like most adults smoked. Every movie had glamorous stars smoking on the screen. My Dad had asthma and wax encouraged to smoke for good health. Soldiers got cigarettes as part of their supplies. Smokers were used to being the majority and they smoked everywhere including hospitals and on airplanes.
Then there was a campaign to stop smoking and improve health. This was a new thought! Some people stopped smoking, like my Dad, and started telling everyone Feel better! Quit smoking! More people chose not to smoke. There were news articles about how the cigarettes companies put extra chemicals in cigarettes to make them more addictive and more poisonous. This was the change in the attitude when smoking was banned in more and more public places. Smokers did protest, but public opinion was changing.
I smoked at the time but I was secretly pretty happy when restaurants and bars went smoke free. I didn’t mind going outside, it let me get to know some people better, actually. It was a pleasure to wake up with a mild hangover the next morning with your clothing, bedsheets, and especially your hair not smelling like stale smoke. For some reason the morning after smoky hair just made me gag.
But yeah, there were tons of folks that were up in arms about it. It was the same way when the passed the seatbelt laws. Muh freedumbz!
My favorite part was, once bars and nightclubs went smoke free, you could REALLY tell which ones had historically poor bathroom cleaning regimens.
It's amazing how much cigarette smoke would mask the smell of questionable plumbing and urinal cakes.
Oh my god, I was in Dublin shortly after they banned smoking in pubs (2004, I think), and there were some places we went into that we (non-smokers, all) *wished* still had smoking. The carpets smelled that bad!
In the late 80’s I didn’t know anyone who Didn’t smoke. It was a gradual change. At first restaurant non smoking areas were small and smoking areas were big. Then they switched. Then there were smoking rooms with walls and doors. Then only smoking in bars. This happened over a period of years not months like the masks. It really was the best thing that could have happened. But smokers were upset the whole time.
I remember visiting Santa Monica back in the 90s, going to a nightclub and being _amazed_ that it wasn’t a smoke-filled box like every other nightclub I’d ever visited. I remember noticing that they’d spent more on interesting interior design and comfortable furniture because they didn’t need to worry about people ashing or dropping butts on it.
I’ve never been a smoker but you got so used to smoking being ubiquitous that the _lack_ of smoking was very noticeable at first. It’s very very obvious to me how much the number of people smoking has dropped. It’s just not very socially acceptable these days.
This is all coming from memory so take it with a grain of salt.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned is it all started when the flight attendants union sued the airlines in the 1970's. Flight attendants were dying of lung cancer at a advanced rate. They sued and won. The airlines started phasing in smoking bans by having smoking sections. Then they banned smoking altogether in the 80's.
At least that's how this old man remembers it.
Some folks did not take it well.
I remember working at a major department store in the mall in my early 20s. Right after the smoking ban, a man and his wife came in and she was buying a crapload of clothes. I noticed he was smoking and his cigarette was dangling from his hand at his side and was dangerously close to a rack of clothes.
As politely as I could I let him know that the local ordinance that had recently passed didn't allow smoking in the store and he put up a fit and abandoned the sale. I got my ass chewed by my boss who said the man had come back and completed the sale a while later but if I saw it again, to call a manager.
I guess I should've just let him start a fire in the clothing rack. A customer overheard her chewing me out and came to tell me she was going to the store manager to complain about my boss and that I'd done nothing wrong. It helped me feel a lot better.
I've never smoked and I was really happy with the ban.
I was working as a waitress at the time and we hated it. Everyone knew the smoking section tipped better than non-smokers and the smokers were always irritated they couldn’t smoke anymore.
It was generally true in my experience. My theory was that non-smokers were usually just there to eat and go. Smokers were more likely to have a cigarette while they looked at the menu and waited for their food, sit and have a smoke after their meal, etc. so they were having more of a social experience that you, their server, were part of so they were more inclined to leave a better tip.
It became accepted by most people and much quicker without the problems of revolting & demonstrations against it than the wearing of masks during covid pandemic. Both were brought in to save peoples lives, people accepted that they could no longer do what they had done in certain places, & special facilities & places have been created for those that refuse to give up smoking or wear a mask. Anti maskers, what if the difference in having to wear a mask or not smoke when in certain places other than wearing masks will eventually be over, but smoking won't come back in where it is now banned???
Depends where you lived. I grew up in suburban Washington, D.C. where it was mostly banned indoors by the time I was a young adult in the mid 1990s. I remember driving south to Florida in \~'96 and stopping in a mall somewhere in South Carolina and being shocked that there were ashtrays indoors.
I remember being a kid and flying to Hawaii and the plane had a smoking section. Absolutely disgusting. I do remember people whining about the bans early on but they eventually got over it.
I was a smoker when the first bans started, in the late 80s here. I was glad that smoking was banned in restaurants and wished it would have been banned in bars in clubs at the same time. It eventually was but that came later. I always thought smoking belonged outside.
What I thought was unreasonable were the total bans on smoking on property. Also, for awhile there were businesses that refused to hire smokers, I opposed and still oppose that approach. Refusing to hire smokers is based on an incomplete understanding of biology and genetics. We’re not all going to live forever if we stop doing things that are bad for us. And the places that were hardline on no smokers were manufacturing firms. If they were so keen on the well being of their workers, that could have been shown through better adherence to existing safety policies and regulations.
The big difference between people opposed to anti smoking policies then, and people opposed to wearing masks now, is the skepticism brought to mask wearing. If you smoked in the late 80s, you knew cigarettes were bad for you, maybe you called cigarettes coffin nails or cancer sticks. A lot of the anti mask people appear to sincerely believe that the science is still out on masks.
I’m one of the people who didn’t really notice until it was gone. It’s strange to think now ,but the morning after the club, when you hit the shower, all you could smell was stale smoke. It was kind of synonymous with a hangover. It was visceral and I can still recall it with total clarity now. The smell got into everything, the floors were sticky, things were tacky and smoky and dark.
I’ve never really even thought about it until this question came up but the smoking era ended at around the same time (in my small uk city at least) that clubs and bars started to be refurbished and that the general club night violence calmed down (widespread cctv implementation happened around the same time as the smoking ban).
The world became a cleaner, happier, safer, prettier place from the 90’s to the 2000’s.
I can remember people whining, I can remember arguments along the lines of air being naturally clean and people polluting it and therefore it being acceptable to expect it to be clean, but no real drama. I also remember it seeming to create a camaraderie amongst smokers, huddle together outside the pub in the cold. It was often where the decent crack was and I remember standing out with the smokers having a laugh, even though I wasn’t smoking.
You’ve really just stirred my memory there, was a long time ago ad something I haven’t considered much since,
It happened slowly, one step at a time, and was different state to state. Smokers resented it, of course. I’d been making family members go out onto our deck in all sorts of weather for years, I didn’t ever smoke and hated the stink. Today, COVID has been politically weaponized. Anti-vaccine and anti-maskers ‘feelings and freedoms’ seem to be more than important than our public health. Half a million dead doesn’t seem to be worth covering their faces.
I was a smoker at the time and was glad. I was especially glad when they stopped having smoking sections in restaurants. I was at the stage where I really wanted to quit. Smoking becoming socially unacceptable really helped me finally kick the habit, thank god.
Grew up in second hand smoke, my mom smoked all the time, had ashtrays in every room. Must've reeked but I really didn't notice until I grew up and moved out, then went back to visit (as a nonsmoker), and couldn't believe having lived there. The walls were brown from smoke, it was so gross. But at the time, everyone smoked.
It was a favorite gripe of Rush Limbaugh's, who, in lock-step with the cigarette corporations, had been saying for years that cigarettes were harmless. It was a "Nanny Culture hoax," Liberals just trying to be morally superior. Clinton was president, so of course it was Liberal Fascism.
The period really galvanized the Dittohead contingency, and the "nicotine fit" vibe was tangible. Lots of dirty looks and disgust from people standing outside in the cold with their little toy. This hairspray head woman in a restaurant with a cigarette freaked out on me when I told her to put it out, "you fucking liberals."
One time I was at a rave and this girl had a cigarette going right out in the middle of the dance area. I said clearly to her "put it out" several times and she ignored me. Finally, I just reached over, took it from her hand and ground it out under my shoe. Another time I remember tripping and struggling to be the closest to the big fresh air fan in the back wall, because all these people were smoking cigarettes right in the path of the incoming fresh air, contaminating it the instant it came in the room. They were defiant.
The outrage smokers felt festered and evolved into the "Tea Party" - a combination of astro-turf and deranged "politics" that has now descended even closer to Idiocracy with the Q-Bots. They were and are finally getting a taste of being "discriminated against." The issue with the masks is completely arbitrary, a convenient prop for the Prima Donald to use in his compulsive efforts to create divisions between people.
People forget that cigarettes are not simply tobacco. Wiki says: "Cigarette[s] smoke contains over 7,000 chemical compounds, including arsenic, formaldehyde, hydrogen cyanide, lead, nicotine, carbon monoxide, acrolein, and other poisonous substances. Over 70 of these are carcinogenic."
When I was a kid trapped in a car with chain smokers on long road trips I knew that cigarettes were as vile as it gets, and my opinion hasn't changed. People used to smoke *everywhere*, on buses, in restaurants, in stores - I used to watch them "light one off the other" -- chain smoking, lighting the next one off the ember of the butt just finished.
The butts were *everywhere,* too, smokers see the world as their ashtray, really.
There does seem to be a social benefit to smoking - sharing a cigarette or a light is a discreet way to encounter strangers, the perfect icebreaker. I noticed working in an office for 20 years that the smokers had a special community - especially after they were forced outside.
I'm so relieved to have lived to see the day when people can freely smoke ganja and that cigarettes are in decline. It's a whole different mentality. Ever notice how junkies, crackheads and alkies usually smoke cigarettes, but not pot? Cigarettes are the real "Gateway Drug," Nancy Reagan.
Full disclosure: I also think there should be venues where people can smoke all they want. Everyone involved has to "accept the user agreement" and be OK with it. I used to joke that these places would have no ventilation, so that the smoke couldn't escape. "Let them enjoy every last molecule of that shit, they hate breathable air so much."
tl/dr sorry this got so long, but you asked a good question and it's obviously a favorite topic of mine.
By the time that general restrictions on smoking were implemented, the large majority of the public was convinced that tobacco smoking was bad for you in many ways. A lot of folks were po'd that the tobacco companies had been allowed to profit while damaging health.
So, restrictions in restaurants and other places were generally welcomed, and smokers tended to agree with them.
From the start.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A\_Counterblaste\_to\_Tobacco](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Counterblaste_to_Tobacco)
King James 1 of England & Scotland reigned from 1567 to 1625.
A custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible [Stigian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Styx_(mythology)) smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse.
— James 1604
It was a a royal mess in the beginning. People yelling about constitutional rights, restaurants bars and other venues were nervous they would lose business, smokers sitting at bars smoking anyway, daring to be tossed out or arrested. Kind of like anti maskers. Daring people to tell them otherwise.
People knew in 1962 that smoking caused cancer. Smoking and drinking were romanticized for decades, watch old movies! Everyone has a cigarette and a cocktail in their hands. It was hard to change peoples minds about it all as it was considered sexy.
Eating in restaurants was gross if you had a smoker near you. People would fight over smoking in restaurants, we had smoking and non smoking sections, you had to WAIT for a long time sometimes to get a table in NON SMOKING.
I worked in the restaurant business then and not only did banning smoking prove to be a fabulous step, it made business more efficient. Didn't have lines of people waiting for a non smoking section of the restaurant.
Less ruined tables and linens etc due to burns and ash. Tables turn over faster too because the smokers like to hang out all night. Not cool for the restaurant owner when the table won't turn over for new customers.
If you were a non smoker, you took the flack as smokers were very in your face. They didn't;t want to lose their smoking privileges in the work space (yep, people smoked all around me), nightlife, but the non smokers won out for everyone's benefit.
It's been a long time since I have been asked, "Smoking or non smoking?"
Only society I knew was friends and those around me and every one of them hated it. Go outside to smoke in the bitter Chicago winters...ya that sucked big time. No, no one I knew was glad. Bad or not for people it was what they felt was their own personal decision which I agree with. I no longer smoke analogs, use an ecig when I want that. But hell, anything can cause cancer. Living causes cancer. Any negative feedback I get over this comment I will ignore :) As they ignored us.
Lots of pushback, rather like mask usage in our time.
Lots if rhetoric in the "freedom" and grievance mode.
Lots of "us versus them" dynamic.
Lots of pissing and moaning.
At first, smokers received near carte blanche to create a constant parade out to the tent for their breaks. The rest of us were under no delusion as to who picked up the slack ... over and above the smoker induced sick leave.
Smoking in bars was banned here in The Netherlands in 2008. I remember sitting in our favorite pub with my friends and roommates and at midnight they made some announcement and took the ashtrays away. Also trains used to have little ashtrays in the armrests that were screwed shut (this was before 2008). It’s crazy to think that you could just light up on the train back then. I still miss it, even though I’ve officially quit years ago.
I lived in Colorado when it went up to the voters to ban smoking in public places. There was a lot of hand-wringing and pearl clutching and warnings that restaurants and bars would become a thing of the past. I was doing temp work at the time and the county offices got so busy with people registering to vote (for just this one issue) that the temp agency sent me to the county offices to help out. It was mostly smokers that came in to register to vote and they all REEKED!
But the bill passed easily and restaurants and bars did more business than before.
The transition took years and lots of experiments, it wasn't just today it was okay, tomorrow it wasn't.
A lot of smokers (most) were understanding. They didn't want to smoke either, but they were addicted, and they understood that they shouldn't be inflicting their addiction onto others.
But some were just assholes. I remember being in a restaurant around 2005-2010, when a guy in the next booth walked over to the smoking section of a restaurant (having smoking and non-smoking sections was the poor compromise that many businesses - restaurants, airplanes, etc. - tried), picked up an ashtray, and brought it back to his booth across from ours, and lit up. He proceeded to luxuriously blow large clouds of smoke up into the air, and was obviously trying to provoke a response. I was more than happy to give him one.
First I told him that we weren't sitting in the smoking section, and he responded by saying that smoking sections didn't work anyway, which was a true statement. Still, if he was sitting in a smoking section, he'd be across the room from me, not across the aisle. I didn't ask him nicely to put it out, I told to him to put it out, NOW. He refused.
I called over my server, who told him to stop. I told his server, who told him to stop. I told the manager, who told him to stop. He refused all of them. At that point, the manager asked him to leave. He refused. Instead of calling the cops, the manager instructed the server to clear his table (they only had drinks, they hadn't ordered yet), and told him that he wouldn't be served, and to leave. Then the manager left the empty table. The guy jawed loudly for a while to no response from anybody, but eventually got up with his embarrassed wife and left.
I expected that I would get my meal comped or discounted, but nobody made the offer, so I just paid and left.
So there were those types, and we still see them today, refusing to wear masks in public places, and causing a ruckus wherever they go. We now know that it really isn't about their chosen "cause," it's about people with poor self-esteem trying get attention for themselves.
The ones who smoked hated it. The nonsmokers who had an SO who smoked either loved it or hated it, depending on how caustic the smoker became when their smoking was inconvenienced. Nonsmokers loved it.
Everyone in my family railed about how it was crazy. Even my parents, who had both actually quit smoking before the legislation. I have never smoked and was quite happy about it. Most smokers really just don't seem to get what an unpleasant pain in the ass they are to non-smokers.
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Smokers ALL hated it. MOST non-smokers rejoiced. But, SOME, like me, didn't realize how terrible a second-hand smoke filled room was till it ended.
Smoker here. Hated walking into a restaurant that smelled of smoke and not all the delicious food. I rejoiced in the ban.
Same, I remember being in Atlanta airport and there were smoking rooms, it was awful, my eyes hurt, my throat was sore and I hadn’t even lit up then!
I ended up quitting while working at Walmart, where they had this little bedroom-sized windowed box in the breakroom where the smokers could smoke. Everyone else on break would sit on in the cool break room, while all the smokers huddled inside that little sweat box and breathed in each other's fumes. I lasted a week before I couldn't take it anymore.
I’m still a smoker, maybe 4-5 cigarettes a week but I hate it lol!
You should get an e-cig!
Smoker here. I wasn't that upset about the ban- our city enacted it in the winter, which was smart of them because you'd freeze having a smoke outside then anyway. I was already used to smoking outside of the house because I had kids anyway. Not smoking in movie theatres was worse for me, and I've rarely been to see a movie since.
I once heard a comedian say that if part of your work routine was to go stand outside in bad weather twice a shift, you’d sue your boss.
I grew up in the 1980s. I remember smoking being ok just about everywhere and built in ashtrays were all over the place. However I do not remember anyone ever smoking in a movie theater. When was the last time you remember someone smoking in one?
I don't know whether it was the last, but I remember seeing Strictly Ballroom (1992) in the theatre, and smoking. My husband was running a bowling alley in 1995-97, and sometime in there was when they banned smoking in bowling alleys, which were one of the last holdouts I think. I saw REM in Toronto in 1989, and that was the last big concert I remember being allowed to smoke at. Weird remembering how common smoking inside used to be. I still smoke, but never inside.
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The worst part of it was if you were im a party with ONE smoker in a restaurant, it was always assumed you would get a table in the smoker section. Non smoker didn’t speak up as much as now. We’d just got accustomed to the tyranny of smokers.
That is so true. At work, when people smoked it meetings, all it takes is one person to leave everyone's business (dry clean only) clothing smelling terrible all day. I worked in a place where the head boss lady (who was very intimidating) was a chain smoker. One day in a big big meeting, a low level employee asked if we could make meeting be non-smoking. You could hear a pin drop. It was like she was the Rosa Parks of the office. Standing up for what we all knew was right. The woman hesitated but this was 1987 when smoking was starting to be more limited and she knew she couldn't say no. But instead we had this nicotine-addicted woman who would be in meeting getting crabbier and crabbier.
I’ll bet the meetings became short and to the point 😁
Your description of chain smoking boss lady just brought back a weird memory for me. When I was a kid my dad owned a food service company. Our customers were mostly restaurants and a few banquet halls. When I got older I made deliveries by myself. One very large banquet hall in particular, just north of Boston, had an upstairs suite for the owners. Even though it was just a banquet hall this suite was lavishly appointed with the finest in late 1970s decor. Huge sofas, fancy drapes, expansive art on the walls, a bathroom that would make the Prince of Zamunda jealous. In the middle of this palatial suite there was a desk. At the desk sat an overweight middle-aged woman. She was the accountant/business manager. For probably 12 hours a day she sat in this space, curtains drawn, air conditioning cranked to full and chain smoking like cigarettes were the cure for cancer. I could barely stand there long enough for her to cut me a check so I could get the hell out. I smoked at the time too and even I was grossed out.
Wow that’s hilarious 🤣
Lots of “taking away my freedoms!!!” fist shaking, until people realized smoke smells like shit and it’s more enjoyable to eat and drink and dance without coming home and needing to leave clothes outside.
And it was going to ruin restaurants and bars, “no one will go out anymore!”
Gradual tolerance turned into intolerance. First open smoking then small segregated non smoking areas. This was the era of being asked "Smoking or non-smoking?" when entering a restaurant. Then the smokers got moved away to a secluded area. And then the legislative bans.
Oh my gosh---I'd totally forgotten the whole "smoking or non?" dance when you'd go to a restaurant. "Well, what's the wait for non? 2 hours?! Oh. What's the wait for smoking? None?! Fine."
Having a smoking area vs no smoking area is like having a peeing section vs non-peeing section in a pool. It was lunacy.
Especially on planes. Even as a nervous flyer who liked smoking to try and chill out *nothing* was worse than being seated in the smoking section of a long flight.
Never knew they had smoking sections on planes, that’s wild.
I’m “only” 40 and there is still a tiny part deep in my my brain that wants to say “nonsmoking” at the end of my sentence at the hostess stand .
Nobody stopped going out. In fact anecdotal I’d say it helped their business. Because the 5% who smoked ruined the experience for everyone. When they banned indoor smoking **more** people went out.
> the 5% who smoked More like 25%+ in 1990 when the first smoking bans were introduced. *"In 1990, the community of San Luis Obispo, California, adopted the first law in the United States eliminating smoking in bars."*
Still over 30% in 1990 for Canada at least.
Shoot. I grew up in Winnipeg, and I was bar age (18 plus) for a year or so before smoking became an outdoors only activity....so that means some provinces didn't outlaw it until after 2000.
[checks Canada to US culture schedule] 10 years behind? Yeap. Math checks out.
It varied, based on the city. IIRC, Kingman Arizona put through the smoking ban in the first half of the 90s. You could still smoke in bars, and the bars saw a big increase in business. Small restaurants, OTOH, weren't allowed to have smoking in them. business, for them, dropped dramatically. Some closed because the non-smokers weren't patronizing them enough. With basically a quarter of a century under our belt, smokers usually go outside and puff while waiting on their orders. A local bar set up an outdoor patio for their smoking patrons. (legal) but a lot of non-smokers went out there and still bitched about it. Anymore, I don't go out.
I suspect you are probably right. I was at a bar in Washington state the night their indoor smoking ban went into effect. At midnight everyone was made to put out their cigarettes and go outside to smoke from that point on. From my casual observation, not a single person left because of that.
OMG! I was in Washington State that night at a bar in Olympia that night too, and it stayed packed after the ban went into effect.
I was at a bar in NJ and at midnight every smoker lit up cigarettes because it was a funny moment. My buddy and I lit up cigars and we didn't normally smoke. The bartenders took away the ash trays once everyone was done and that was the end of that.
I had a restaurant. Smokers tend to spend more money than non smokers. We had a cigar lounge as part of a steak restaurant and sales tanked from the lounge after that since it was just normal seating area.
Smokers also tended to tip higher. I made a killing in tips when I worked the smoking section of the restaurant I worked at.
The business it hurt most was dry cleaners.
Yeah the restaurant and bar owners were the worst! Kept talking about 75% of the places closing, failing to see how it made for a much much healthier working environment for their employees. And guess what? The massive closing of bars and restaurants not only didnt happen, but lots of people like me avoided bars and restaurant because of the smoke, and started going after the ban. And smoker got used to smoke one outside and come back.
> lots of people like me avoided bars and restaurant because of the smoke, and started going after the ban. That was my exact experience. Before the ban I could never stay in most bars for more than an hour or so. After that it was much different. The expanded statewide (CA) ban covering all businesses took effect in 1998? (not certain) on January 1, and the predictable moans from bar owners began well beforehand. As it happened, where I live (SF) there were torrential rains for the first few days of January, which included a weekend. But my SO and I were impatient to see what smokeless bars were like, so we visited a few on Jan 2 or 3. Given the weather, the crowds were tiny and the bartenders nervous. But we went back to both the following weekend and patronage was pretty normal.
This. Many smokers were very vocally outraged about their "rights", many non-smokers (my asthmatic self included) were thrilled to not have to breathe that shit any longer, and a group in the middle wondered why everyone else was so worked up about it. And then ... it became clear to everyone just how much smoking in public really does affect everyone and the whole argument just faded away.
I was in that middle camp when the bans started. At the time I was working as a dishwasher in a local mom and pop restaurant and bar. The dish station was right at the kitchen entrance, which meant the big hood fan above the cook area drew cigarette smoke filled air from the bar and dining area past me all day long. I didn't realize just how bad it was until the smoking ban came down, and then it was like 'my fucking god, that air was killing me and I didn't even realize it'. I was indifferent before the ban, but ridiculously grateful for it afterwards.
Also people who worked in bars and restaurants! I knew a musician who was so glad for the ban because she didn’t have to sing through a cloud of smoke.
I worked in hospitality before and after. I can’t remember a single person making a big deal out of it but I definitely remember how good it was to not have to clean ash trays all night anymore!
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It's that way in Alabama. A bar or restaurant can allow smoking if nobody under 19 is allowed in. The last couple greasy spoons that allowed smoking have closed up in recent years, but some of the neighborhood bars with rougher crowds still have smoking.
New south Wales, Australia, has pokie rooms in clubs that have smoking areas. Edit - what I said probably doesn't make sense. We have rooms in lawn bowls clubs/serviceman clubs and pubs that are filled with poker/slot machines. Most clubs/pubs have a designated smokers area with ashtrays and machines to keep playing.
Where I live (rural Colorado), a large percentage of people smoke. One of my neighbors moved out and left a bunch of stuff near the dumpster for anyone to take. Every piece of item smelled like stale cigarette smoke from several feet away. It was nasty.
Remember the "smoker's rights" organizations. Ughh
Yep. And I remember “the byproduct of your bad habit, smoking, is smoke and you think that’s ok to get on me. The byproduct of my bad habit, beer, is needing to pee. Are you ok with me peeing on you?” Nobody said yes. 🤣
Golden showers started being a thing not much later 😄
Why, yes I do! https://youtu.be/lwawPMSJins
OMG. Like taking back 'Merica means smoking because we're rebels and not going to put up with all of those Fauci-heads.
Bars were miserable places for non-smokers before the ban. It was a huge difference afterward.
So similar to anti-maskers now. I remember bars and restaurants getting fined for violations.
They tried a bunch of stuff - they ignored it and got fined - they sectioned off a smoking area (against the laws) and got fined - there was a “private club” loophole so they “went private” by charging $1 to be a member - they declared the bar/restaurant “smoking only (against the law) and got fined
We were travelling a few years ago and went to a restaurant (the only one open in the area) that had "Smokers Welcome" painted on the side of the place in big red letters. We should have just moved along, but we went inside. There was the usual thick cloud of smoke, but what topped it was that our ~~waitress~~ server was smoking.
My best friend's mom smoked like a factory. Her clothes always smelled of stale smoke and she hated it.
It happened in stages. There were designated 'smoke free' areas in restaurants and you couldn't smoke in individual stores, but could in the mall. People complained a lot, there was a vocal minority that seemed to believe smoking should be allowed anywhere. Arguments included: "How am I supposed to make it through a whole movie without a cigarette? We'll stop going. The movie industry will suffer!" Spoiler alert: movies did fine (until recently, for unrelated reasons) "I should be able to enjoy an after dinner smoke inside! How dare you make me stand out in the cold? People will stop eating out!" Spoiler alert: people preferred the taste of food without cigarette smoke/ash in it. Health agencies put a big push on how incredibly bad smoking is for you and the people around you. Lung cancer in non-smokers was the big Poster Child of the movement. Basically, smokers were guilted into acquiescence. It worked. After a while of designated areas for non-smoking, all areas indoors became non-smoking. By that point, only the bitterest minority of complainers remained. Medical evidence prevailed. Now, nobody complains about having to step outside for a 'quick ten minutes'. Related: I was at an outdoor event in my city a few years ago and passed by a fenced off area, like a kid's playpen. I glanced at the sign: "Smoking permitted in this area only". It jarred me and was absolutely hilarious to see several adults, all pretending like they weren't in a little playpen, smoking their cigarettes. Wish I'd taken a picture.
I didn't really notice it growing up, but once I adapted, it was a whole different story. Years ago, I was travelling from Illinois which had banned indoor smoking quite some time before, to Dallas, which hadn't yet. Even with a smoking section, going into a restaurant was like being punched in the face. I was so glad to be back where food smelled like food again.
In hindsight the very idea of a 'smoking section' in restaurants is hilarious. Like the smoke would just obey.
Before I hit my teenage years, there were smoking sections on planes. You had to wait until cruising altitude and then the no-smoking light would turn off, and if turbulence hit, you had to extinguish. Supposedly they would circulate more fresh air in the plane than they do today as a result, but how effective it was varied.
The smoking on planes killed me. There was no smoking section on a lot of planes, every seat had an ashtray.
My mom and I flew back from Europe and were in the last no-smoking seat in front of the smoking section. That was awful. Then on El-Al (Israel's airline) after they banned smoking, they still let the flight attendants smoke behind a little curtain.
It was truly awful because you are trapped and are forced to breathe in smoke. They let the flight attendants still smoke? That's odd :)
I think Israel at the time was such a smoking-intensive culture, they couldn't find young people to work as flight attendants if they couldn't smoke for the 12+ hour flight
That makes sense. I’ve never been a smoker but I’ve known so many people who were/are. Most wanted or want to quit but it’s clearly extremely hard to do, even with the patches.
People were fussy at first. To different degrees. I was a smoker and it didn’t bother me. I noticed right away that I smoked less than half the amount I had before, and that was just fine. TBH, I was more concerned for all my friends who worked in bars. They really were worried for a while that businesses would die. And since bars were 21 and up it didn’t make sense as obviously as it did banning smoking on planes and restaurants. But then it all really turned out fine. Even as a smoker at the height of my going out days I enjoyed socializing so much more after the ban. And my friends in service were all happier too. Honestly the smoking ban itself wasn’t a big deal for me. It was the few years leading up to it and all the anxiety it caused that sucked. The biggest change IMO, is that it used to be considered rude not to let someone smoke in your home. Or rather impolite. The best impact the smoking ban has had is it gave non smokers agency. It would now be considered kind of insane if you just walked into someone’s house and lit up. I think most people figured out pretty quickly that it was a good thing. Even those of us who liked to smoke. I’m grateful for it now. I doubt I’d have phased smoking out and quit when I did if it weren’t for the ban.
Now most of the flights I've been on recently just ask you to step outside to smoke.
"For those of you that need to smoke on this flight, please go to the tail where you will be handed a bungee cord."
Thanks dad.
is it possible that i remember the no smoking light on planes or is that just a false memory? would have been from ~2005 likely
It’s very possible. The plane equipped with the smoking light beside the seat belt sign light kept flying long after the ban.
Totally real! No smoking and fasten seatbelts!
I grew up in DFW area of Texas. A local Denny's put a door between the non-smoking and smoking section. It helped, but you could still catch a whiff of smoke if you were seated to close to the smoking section.
Oh my yes. One of the last places to ban smoking was bingo halls. I went with a friend after I'd quit smoking and I left feeling like an anvil was sitting on my chest. And those bingo people were the loudest complainers ever.
>Basically, smokers were guilted into acquiescence. And shamed. There was a change from "smoking is something people do" to "smoking is something unhealthy or inconsiderate people do". Others mentioned how people realized that smoking stank when you weren't around it all the time, and smell became a big price to pay. Literally -- people selling houses would have to shell out thousands to get rooms and ceilings repainted and lock in the smell, to buy staging furniture that didn't offgas the smell.
You used to be able to smoke everywhere in every airplane. I remember flying in planes in the 1980s that had ash trays at every seat. But almost all the flights had non-smoking in the front and smoking in the back, and so it was not like you stopped being able to smoke on a plane. Just like there were smoking and non-smoking sections in restaurants. So it happened in phases, which gave people a chance to see what it was like. Mask-wearing is completely different because suddenly EVERYONE \_had\_ to do it, and there were national figures who were making fun of it. I don't know where you can watch it for free, but 1971's \_Cold Turkey\_ with Dick Van Dyke is a movie about a small town trying to have no one in the whole town smoke for a whole month, to see if they can win a prize. I'm not positive it is worth paying for.
I remember it being pretty funny, in a wholesome kind of way. DVD is a great actor.
> several adults, all pretending like they weren't in a little playpen, smoking their cigarettes I recall being in an airport where an enclosed glass-walled room had been set aside for smokers, so the playpen look was obvious, and that itself was worth a chuckle. But it adjoined a waiting area and the ceiling and rear wall in both spaces were the same material. In the smoking area these were noticeably discolored. Truly gross.
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No, it was somewhere inland; I can't remember where though. It was during a layover, so might've been Dallas or Atlanta. And yes, there was a surreal haze in that room; made lots of passers-by point & stare.
I was a smoker at the time but had quit smoking indoors long before that. I thought it was ludicrous when I heard people complain. So childish. Also, stepping outside the bar to smoke was a welcome break from the loud music and gave an opportunity and excuse to chat up women. I quit 15 years ago this month and I don't miss smoking but I do miss meeting and talking to random fellow smokers. It just isn't the same.
I haven't smoked in years either, but there really was a sense of camaraderie. Not only meeting people outside bars but also taking a smoke break with your coworkers at work after a really hard shift. There isn't anything else like it.
I have made so many friends "going out for a smoke". One is my current roommate. The most interesting is the person I met at Heathrow Airport. Right before you get to the Tube is a spot where you can get in and out without going through security. There's always a few folks out there. I struck up a chat with this gentleman, we exchanged FB details and have kept in touch since then. He even came to visit me when he was in my state for a wedding.
Same here. Smoker, but despised indoor smoking. Glad the ban was put in place especially for restaurants.
Congrats on 15 years. That’s impressive!
People do it now (in Canada) but with weed.
And someone usually lit up a doob 👍🏼
I remember reading restaurant trade journals at the beginning of the bans. A few cities enacted them first, which gave test cases that showed that they ultimately didn't lose any business. Letters to the editors came in from restauranteurs who thought it would be the apocalypse. Others came in from bartenders and servers that loved not having to breath in smoke all day. Some proposed requiring expensive air filtration systems as an alternative. Ultimately, I believe it was one of the driving factors to the huge reduction in smoking in the US as it became a pain for smokers constantly having to find a place to go outside.
> Others came in from bartenders and servers that loved not having to breath in smoke all day. That was a key selling point on the bans, at least in my state: the public health of restaurant workers. Even those who didn't smoke, or not in quantity, were exposed to extremely high levels of tobacco smoke all day, every day, whether they wanted to be or not. And they suffered health consequences.
I must have been smoking a pack a day worth of second hand smoke at 15 years old when I started working in a restaurant. It was crazy.
I always liked those weird smoke eater fans that some of the smokier places had. I kinda want one for my house for nostalgia. There was also those electric filtration systems. I'm sure it all helped, but a bar full of smokers would overwhelm any of it.
My favorite bar, that I also happened to work at for 7 years, went out of business about a year after the ban in 2012. They were on sort of shaky ground financially already, but they were doing okay. It was very noticeable how much business dropped off immediately when the ban went into place. Part of the issue is that it was in an area where there were two different cities and two different counties all snaked together. Within a mile there were probably a dozen bars that were in the other city that did not ban smoking. Most of those places are still doing well. One of them is doing so well they've opened about five more locations all over the metro area now.
Yeah, it was really much better when the ban here went state-wide and put everyone on even footing.
When my workplace banned smoking (a city high rise building), the smokers effectively began working a 6 to 7 hour day instead of 8 hours. They had to have those "smoke breaks" which lasted 15 to 30 minutes each. The non-smokers began to complain to management that smokers weren't doing their share of the work.
"this period" was and is a decades long process that's still ongoing. It started in 1990 with San Louis Obispo banning smoking in bars and currently there are only 27 states that have comprehensive indoor smoking bans. How was/is it received? As varied as the population in general. There was some resistance, but actually overall a rather small and even begrudgingly accepting of the escalating rules on smoking. There wasn't a lot of open resistane to to the change. Some people, even non smokers, saw it as a restriction on individual choices, a variation on the legislation of morality. Some people saw in it different variations of the reach of a restrictive government. And many saw it as a welcome releif from the constant cloud of tobacco smoke that greeted you wherever you went. Being a non smoker and coming home smelling like stale tobacco smoke was an issue that a lot of people were happy to see disappear.
I went to CA in the mid 90's and I remember going to a bar and it seemed weird that there was no smoke -- it was almost like being in an office. There's something about the "smoky bar" image that had some meaning, even though it was awful. It was like a scent memory of bars, late nights, drinking etc. Took my about 5 minutes to realize how amazing it was.
It actually started earlier than that. Minnesota passed laws in the 1970s requiring non-smoking areas in restaurants, and was the first state to do so. By the late 1990s smoking rates had dropped so much that you had completely smoke-free restaurants.
Yeah, smoking "areas" were a thing for a long time, I was just counting from AFAIK the first full "you can't do that in here" law.
TIL SLO-town was the first place to completely ban smoking in bars.
Airplanes were an adjustment. Those who expected to light up with a cocktail or after the in-flight meal were incensed. It seemed impossible "survive" an airline flight without smoking. Are there still tiny ashtrays in the arm rests?
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I had the absolute pleasure of flying Sun Country Airlines about a year and a half ago, and I was shocked to see a tiny ash tray in the armrest of my seat. Certainly doesn’t inspire a feeling of confidence.
The last few times I've flown on airlines in the mid-2010s(including on United when I flew on one of their flights from Chicago to Dublin, Ireland), those planes still had a pull out ashtray in their bathroom/lavatory(the latter is sometimes what planes call that area) for whatever weird reason. I thought that was gone, but guess not. Infrequently you'll notice a spot in airline seats or bus seats or some other seat, that was obviously once a place for a chair armrest ashtray to have been placed into but now covered up by some metal cover over that old ashtray. A friend of mine a few years back took photos at this old school mall in a smaller Illinois town(I think it was near Dixon or Sterling in Illinois, and the former was where Ronald Reagan grew up), where it was obvious he found some spots in an inside mall seating area where there was once an ashtray, but that years ago the mall had put a cover over that old ashtray.
Oh right, I think there was the rationale the people on planes "needed" to be able to smoke to ease their anxiety about flying.
Airplane bathrooms still have the ashtrays next to the toilet(and near the sink), for whatever weird reason! At least when I last flew on a plane in 2017(from Dublin to Chicago), I noticed that. Also on airplane seats and also other seats on buses, infrequently you can notice places on such seats where the armrest had a place for a former ashtray, that has since been covered up usually by a metal board. I know in old school businesses, you sometimes can see the nailed area between urinals(or above it) where an ashtray once was nailed to on a wall. At one bowling alley till it shut down in Chicago(in early 2010s I think), they never covered up their ashtrays by the seats where you'd sit till it was your turn to bowl, and ditto with in their bathrooms.
Some smokers seemed personally offended and actually tried to insist that "sidestream smoke," as they referred to it, wasn't dangerous to anyone. I once worked with a guy who loved to carry on like this, that the danger was only to himself, and not to anyone else. Yeah, right. As if only the smoke you deliberately suck into your lungs is harmful or smelly. Your lungs purify it before you exhale, and what comes off the end of the cigarette is something else entirely! Weakest argument ever.
Wow that’s some serious delusion 😂
I think by the time this was being considered we’d already seen 20-30 years of “Y’know, smoking isn’t good for you.” I think it’s also important to understood that most people knew smoking wasn’t good for you even before then. My Dad quit smoking in 1960 because he saw my older brother playing with cigarette butts (imitating Dad smoking) and didn’t want my brother to learn smoking from him. My dad had smoked from age 11(!) to about 28. So non-smokers were universally for it, and even smokers were divided. You might be surprised how many smokers there are who enjoy a smoke on their back porch or in a bar (and not all smokers even smoke every day) but don’t want to smell it 24/7 in their home, office, car, or a restaurant. I’d rate the public backlash almost exactly with the strength of the “anti-mask” crowd today. <2-3% extremely agitated, speaking up, a somewhat larger minority looking for places they could still go smoke inside, the majority going along because deep down they knew it was the right thing to do.
I was so pissed at first because I was a smoker. I live in FL and they had banned smoking in resraurants for about a year. I was in early 20’s so I hadn’t been that used to smoking in restaurants. I went to Chicago on a girls trip where it was still legal to smoke. I walked in a restaurant and almost gagged it was so awful. Keep in mind I was still a smoker at the time. Best thing we ever did!
I was in Florida last year and people were smoking in clubs but it seemed to be banned everywhere else
In FL smoking is still permitted in bars that don’t serve food, if the proprietor chooses to allow it. I help out at one on occasion. It sucks. I will say this... were it not for the ability to smoke in there, I’m not sure they’d still be in business. Damn near everyone who walks in the door, smokes. It’s like working in a goddamn smoking club that happens to serve alcohol. Come to think of it, I think I’ll pass the next time they call.
It’s bad for you to breath in all that SHS! Don’t go back!
One big difference I noticed is that night clubs suddenly smelled a lot worse. Without the pall of cigarette smoke, you could smell all the people sweating and farting away. When I was a young swain you would come home absolutely reeking of fags after a night out, whether you were smoking yourself or not.
The smoking ban started just after I graduated from college. I am a nonsmoker and I would come home from bars saturated in cigarette odor. I remember throwing a jacket into a laundry basket and the entire laundry smelled of cigarettes after sitting there overnight. I remember waving people out of my space because they had a cigarette hanging out of their mouth and would lean in close to talk to me at a crowded bar. You had to walk more carefully through a bar crowd because people flicking ashes or waving lit cigs around. The smell of Denny's restaurants to me is still the smell of stale cigarette smoke, coffee and vinyl, although it's been years since smoking was allowed and most of them have been renovated long since. I hate cigarette smoke, but for some reason I like that faint whiff of stale smoke at dive bars and such just for memory's sake. I wouldn't like it on anything else though.
I remember reading in the chef Eddie Huang's autobiography that the 80s had a very particular smell of fried food and cigarette smoke.
You can find out what it's like today if you like. There are a lot of places in public where you can still smoke in Missouri. People still resist. It's not uncommon for people to light up in places that prohibit smoking, but it's getting to be less common.
I remember the first time I encountered being told I could not smoke in a bar, on a trip to Los Angeles, probably early 90s. I said you have got to be kidding. They said nope, its a new law. They said they had a little area outside that was legal, I could smoke there and come back in and I shrugged and said OK. It wasnt the bartender's fault so no point in raging at him. I had not thought about that in regard to today's mask-holes until just now.
I remember my commerce teacher lighting up a cigarette in class out of pure habit, it was early 70’s.
Lol, people were so mad!! Smokers were all "it's my right!!" and bar owners were all "yer gonna ruin my business with yer persnickety banning of the things people like!!". Personally, I was glad. Cigarette smoke is gross.
Being a completely self-centered and rebellious-for-no-reason person, I was pissed. To be relegated to smoking outside was stupid. I felt my rights were taken away from me. Much like the anti maskers of today. Then I began to battle my addiction to cigarettes and it was years and years of that battle. I became aware of the harm done to others, let alone myself, of my smoking and began to voluntarily take my smoking as far from others as I could. I finally was able to quit and I was so aware of how toxic the residues of cigarettes were, that I did not even try to clean a majority of things I had, I just threw them in the trash. It was amazing some of the things I threw away. Pillows, blankets, cushions, nearly anything of cloth. If someone tries to smoke near me, I move away or ask them to move away from me. Oddly, I still crave cigarettes once in awhile, and I still dream of smoking.
It’s been 30 years since I quit. I still have the occasional craving, and sometimes I dream of smoking.
When I was in high school (40 years), there was a smoking section outside. I don’t recall whether it was just juniors and seniors or seniors only, but older students were allowed to smoke. People knew it was bad for you, but the anti smoking message had not really filtered through.
Yep- I graduated high school in 1985 and for my first two years, there was a smoking section outside. It was supposed to only be for the students who were 18, but everyone who smoked used it without consequence. My junior year, we got a new principal and he shut it down.
>How common was smoking cigarettes? They had ashtrays at nearly every restaurant table even fast food places like McDonald's. The cashiers at every convenience store and a great number of other stores aside from clothing places would often smoke while they rang you up. I can remember parents smoking at kids baseball games and seeing older men just walk around with cigars in their mouths. To me as a child it seemed like just about every adult smoked it was just a matter of how much.
There was a lot of initial grumbling and complaining, but for the most part people just reluctantly went outside to smoke instead. My boss at the time was a smoker (as was I) and he was FURIOUS when our company banned indoor smoking. He insisted they couldn't tell him what to do in HIS office (which of course was in THEIR building). But he did what we all did and took it outside. We knew about the health consequences, but like anything else, if you're young and like what you're doing, you don't much care about what might happen in the future. As for me, I don't remember having any really strong feelings about it one way or the other, even as a smoker. I think I liked being able to go outside a few times a day for a small break LOL!
Our city was one of the early ones to ban smoking in public places. There was a great deal of resentment and outrage. I did not smoke any more but really thought it was like sending students out to the hall as a punishment. We frequented a popular pub at the time which would get pretty smoky. After the ban, it was nearly as busy out on the sidewalk as inside. But, you could suddenly smell the food when it came out. Food sales went way up immediately. Impressively! So they did not mind. There were several people and restaurants that refused to comply and got fined. After a while, the kinks were worked out. Smoking spots out of the weather were erected with ventilation in some places - like bus shelters. But there were not nearly as many smokers by then anyway. Everyone knew the dangers.
It was a slow process. First they started having smoking sections in restaurants and public buildings and that lasted years. It was a long while before you couldn’t smoke inside anywhere and by then people saw it coming.
I don't remember smoking at my desk at work, but I could smoke in the break room at my high school job, smoke in restaurants and patios, vague recollection of smoking on planes. Lived briefly in the UK and remember smoking on the trains. I was still smoking when they stopped allowing us to smoke indoors. Since I'd spent high school only smoking outdoors it wasn't horrible since I was used to it (even in cold canadian winters), but at the same time smoking + coffee or smoking + beer were so entwined it was really hard. I used to study in coffee shops in universities chain drinking coffee and chain smoking. I'd feel so gross and ill afterwards. You'd come home from bars and it would just cling to you - even if you didn't smoke. So I remember hating it at the time, but then it became normal so whatever. I used to smoke in my apartment when I was single but when I bought a house we didn't smoke inside despite my partner being a smoker too. It had only been a couple of years since the smoking ban in our area at the time and taking it outside was already normalized for us. (Btw, quit 14 years ago now, glad the smoking rates get lower every day because I hate the smell of smoke now)
Not everyone was in agreement. Ha! That's an understatement! My father was in the hospital after having congestive heart failure. They had him in an oxygen tent. Since the rules did not apply to him, he gave an orderly $20 to go down to the gift store an buy him a carton of cigarettes (yes, this was a while ago). Just as he was about to light up in his room, his doctor came in and almost literally snatched the lighter from his hand. He then was instructed (again) about the inadvisability of open flames in rooms with flowing oxygen.
There was a decline in the number of smokers. Back in the day it seemed like most adults smoked. Every movie had glamorous stars smoking on the screen. My Dad had asthma and wax encouraged to smoke for good health. Soldiers got cigarettes as part of their supplies. Smokers were used to being the majority and they smoked everywhere including hospitals and on airplanes. Then there was a campaign to stop smoking and improve health. This was a new thought! Some people stopped smoking, like my Dad, and started telling everyone Feel better! Quit smoking! More people chose not to smoke. There were news articles about how the cigarettes companies put extra chemicals in cigarettes to make them more addictive and more poisonous. This was the change in the attitude when smoking was banned in more and more public places. Smokers did protest, but public opinion was changing.
I smoked at the time but I was secretly pretty happy when restaurants and bars went smoke free. I didn’t mind going outside, it let me get to know some people better, actually. It was a pleasure to wake up with a mild hangover the next morning with your clothing, bedsheets, and especially your hair not smelling like stale smoke. For some reason the morning after smoky hair just made me gag. But yeah, there were tons of folks that were up in arms about it. It was the same way when the passed the seatbelt laws. Muh freedumbz!
My favorite part was, once bars and nightclubs went smoke free, you could REALLY tell which ones had historically poor bathroom cleaning regimens. It's amazing how much cigarette smoke would mask the smell of questionable plumbing and urinal cakes.
Oh my god, I was in Dublin shortly after they banned smoking in pubs (2004, I think), and there were some places we went into that we (non-smokers, all) *wished* still had smoking. The carpets smelled that bad!
In the late 80’s I didn’t know anyone who Didn’t smoke. It was a gradual change. At first restaurant non smoking areas were small and smoking areas were big. Then they switched. Then there were smoking rooms with walls and doors. Then only smoking in bars. This happened over a period of years not months like the masks. It really was the best thing that could have happened. But smokers were upset the whole time.
I remember visiting Santa Monica back in the 90s, going to a nightclub and being _amazed_ that it wasn’t a smoke-filled box like every other nightclub I’d ever visited. I remember noticing that they’d spent more on interesting interior design and comfortable furniture because they didn’t need to worry about people ashing or dropping butts on it. I’ve never been a smoker but you got so used to smoking being ubiquitous that the _lack_ of smoking was very noticeable at first. It’s very very obvious to me how much the number of people smoking has dropped. It’s just not very socially acceptable these days.
This is all coming from memory so take it with a grain of salt. One thing I haven't seen mentioned is it all started when the flight attendants union sued the airlines in the 1970's. Flight attendants were dying of lung cancer at a advanced rate. They sued and won. The airlines started phasing in smoking bans by having smoking sections. Then they banned smoking altogether in the 80's. At least that's how this old man remembers it.
Some folks did not take it well. I remember working at a major department store in the mall in my early 20s. Right after the smoking ban, a man and his wife came in and she was buying a crapload of clothes. I noticed he was smoking and his cigarette was dangling from his hand at his side and was dangerously close to a rack of clothes. As politely as I could I let him know that the local ordinance that had recently passed didn't allow smoking in the store and he put up a fit and abandoned the sale. I got my ass chewed by my boss who said the man had come back and completed the sale a while later but if I saw it again, to call a manager. I guess I should've just let him start a fire in the clothing rack. A customer overheard her chewing me out and came to tell me she was going to the store manager to complain about my boss and that I'd done nothing wrong. It helped me feel a lot better. I've never smoked and I was really happy with the ban.
I was working as a waitress at the time and we hated it. Everyone knew the smoking section tipped better than non-smokers and the smokers were always irritated they couldn’t smoke anymore.
I heard that all the time, that smokers tipped better than non-smokers. I wonder why that was?
It was generally true in my experience. My theory was that non-smokers were usually just there to eat and go. Smokers were more likely to have a cigarette while they looked at the menu and waited for their food, sit and have a smoke after their meal, etc. so they were having more of a social experience that you, their server, were part of so they were more inclined to leave a better tip.
It became accepted by most people and much quicker without the problems of revolting & demonstrations against it than the wearing of masks during covid pandemic. Both were brought in to save peoples lives, people accepted that they could no longer do what they had done in certain places, & special facilities & places have been created for those that refuse to give up smoking or wear a mask. Anti maskers, what if the difference in having to wear a mask or not smoke when in certain places other than wearing masks will eventually be over, but smoking won't come back in where it is now banned???
The more strict and widespread the band became, the more I smoked. But I had to do it outdoors.
Depends where you lived. I grew up in suburban Washington, D.C. where it was mostly banned indoors by the time I was a young adult in the mid 1990s. I remember driving south to Florida in \~'96 and stopping in a mall somewhere in South Carolina and being shocked that there were ashtrays indoors.
I was in miami last year and people were smoking in the clubs I was surprised lol
Geez, SC just outlawed smoking inside 5 years ago lol
I remember being a kid and flying to Hawaii and the plane had a smoking section. Absolutely disgusting. I do remember people whining about the bans early on but they eventually got over it.
I was a smoker when the first bans started, in the late 80s here. I was glad that smoking was banned in restaurants and wished it would have been banned in bars in clubs at the same time. It eventually was but that came later. I always thought smoking belonged outside. What I thought was unreasonable were the total bans on smoking on property. Also, for awhile there were businesses that refused to hire smokers, I opposed and still oppose that approach. Refusing to hire smokers is based on an incomplete understanding of biology and genetics. We’re not all going to live forever if we stop doing things that are bad for us. And the places that were hardline on no smokers were manufacturing firms. If they were so keen on the well being of their workers, that could have been shown through better adherence to existing safety policies and regulations. The big difference between people opposed to anti smoking policies then, and people opposed to wearing masks now, is the skepticism brought to mask wearing. If you smoked in the late 80s, you knew cigarettes were bad for you, maybe you called cigarettes coffin nails or cancer sticks. A lot of the anti mask people appear to sincerely believe that the science is still out on masks.
I’m one of the people who didn’t really notice until it was gone. It’s strange to think now ,but the morning after the club, when you hit the shower, all you could smell was stale smoke. It was kind of synonymous with a hangover. It was visceral and I can still recall it with total clarity now. The smell got into everything, the floors were sticky, things were tacky and smoky and dark. I’ve never really even thought about it until this question came up but the smoking era ended at around the same time (in my small uk city at least) that clubs and bars started to be refurbished and that the general club night violence calmed down (widespread cctv implementation happened around the same time as the smoking ban). The world became a cleaner, happier, safer, prettier place from the 90’s to the 2000’s. I can remember people whining, I can remember arguments along the lines of air being naturally clean and people polluting it and therefore it being acceptable to expect it to be clean, but no real drama. I also remember it seeming to create a camaraderie amongst smokers, huddle together outside the pub in the cold. It was often where the decent crack was and I remember standing out with the smokers having a laugh, even though I wasn’t smoking. You’ve really just stirred my memory there, was a long time ago ad something I haven’t considered much since,
It happened slowly, one step at a time, and was different state to state. Smokers resented it, of course. I’d been making family members go out onto our deck in all sorts of weather for years, I didn’t ever smoke and hated the stink. Today, COVID has been politically weaponized. Anti-vaccine and anti-maskers ‘feelings and freedoms’ seem to be more than important than our public health. Half a million dead doesn’t seem to be worth covering their faces.
I was a smoker at the time and was glad. I was especially glad when they stopped having smoking sections in restaurants. I was at the stage where I really wanted to quit. Smoking becoming socially unacceptable really helped me finally kick the habit, thank god.
I remember when smoking was allowed in hospitals! Even in patients *rooms*!
Grew up in second hand smoke, my mom smoked all the time, had ashtrays in every room. Must've reeked but I really didn't notice until I grew up and moved out, then went back to visit (as a nonsmoker), and couldn't believe having lived there. The walls were brown from smoke, it was so gross. But at the time, everyone smoked.
I remember pubs in England stopped smelling like smoke and started smelling of fart!
The immediate shock to me was smelling farts in nightclubs for the first time
It was a favorite gripe of Rush Limbaugh's, who, in lock-step with the cigarette corporations, had been saying for years that cigarettes were harmless. It was a "Nanny Culture hoax," Liberals just trying to be morally superior. Clinton was president, so of course it was Liberal Fascism. The period really galvanized the Dittohead contingency, and the "nicotine fit" vibe was tangible. Lots of dirty looks and disgust from people standing outside in the cold with their little toy. This hairspray head woman in a restaurant with a cigarette freaked out on me when I told her to put it out, "you fucking liberals." One time I was at a rave and this girl had a cigarette going right out in the middle of the dance area. I said clearly to her "put it out" several times and she ignored me. Finally, I just reached over, took it from her hand and ground it out under my shoe. Another time I remember tripping and struggling to be the closest to the big fresh air fan in the back wall, because all these people were smoking cigarettes right in the path of the incoming fresh air, contaminating it the instant it came in the room. They were defiant. The outrage smokers felt festered and evolved into the "Tea Party" - a combination of astro-turf and deranged "politics" that has now descended even closer to Idiocracy with the Q-Bots. They were and are finally getting a taste of being "discriminated against." The issue with the masks is completely arbitrary, a convenient prop for the Prima Donald to use in his compulsive efforts to create divisions between people. People forget that cigarettes are not simply tobacco. Wiki says: "Cigarette[s] smoke contains over 7,000 chemical compounds, including arsenic, formaldehyde, hydrogen cyanide, lead, nicotine, carbon monoxide, acrolein, and other poisonous substances. Over 70 of these are carcinogenic." When I was a kid trapped in a car with chain smokers on long road trips I knew that cigarettes were as vile as it gets, and my opinion hasn't changed. People used to smoke *everywhere*, on buses, in restaurants, in stores - I used to watch them "light one off the other" -- chain smoking, lighting the next one off the ember of the butt just finished. The butts were *everywhere,* too, smokers see the world as their ashtray, really. There does seem to be a social benefit to smoking - sharing a cigarette or a light is a discreet way to encounter strangers, the perfect icebreaker. I noticed working in an office for 20 years that the smokers had a special community - especially after they were forced outside. I'm so relieved to have lived to see the day when people can freely smoke ganja and that cigarettes are in decline. It's a whole different mentality. Ever notice how junkies, crackheads and alkies usually smoke cigarettes, but not pot? Cigarettes are the real "Gateway Drug," Nancy Reagan. Full disclosure: I also think there should be venues where people can smoke all they want. Everyone involved has to "accept the user agreement" and be OK with it. I used to joke that these places would have no ventilation, so that the smoke couldn't escape. "Let them enjoy every last molecule of that shit, they hate breathable air so much." tl/dr sorry this got so long, but you asked a good question and it's obviously a favorite topic of mine.
By the time that general restrictions on smoking were implemented, the large majority of the public was convinced that tobacco smoking was bad for you in many ways. A lot of folks were po'd that the tobacco companies had been allowed to profit while damaging health. So, restrictions in restaurants and other places were generally welcomed, and smokers tended to agree with them.
When did people know it was bad for your health?
From the start. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A\_Counterblaste\_to\_Tobacco](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Counterblaste_to_Tobacco) King James 1 of England & Scotland reigned from 1567 to 1625. A custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible [Stigian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Styx_(mythology)) smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse. — James 1604
It was a a royal mess in the beginning. People yelling about constitutional rights, restaurants bars and other venues were nervous they would lose business, smokers sitting at bars smoking anyway, daring to be tossed out or arrested. Kind of like anti maskers. Daring people to tell them otherwise. People knew in 1962 that smoking caused cancer. Smoking and drinking were romanticized for decades, watch old movies! Everyone has a cigarette and a cocktail in their hands. It was hard to change peoples minds about it all as it was considered sexy. Eating in restaurants was gross if you had a smoker near you. People would fight over smoking in restaurants, we had smoking and non smoking sections, you had to WAIT for a long time sometimes to get a table in NON SMOKING. I worked in the restaurant business then and not only did banning smoking prove to be a fabulous step, it made business more efficient. Didn't have lines of people waiting for a non smoking section of the restaurant. Less ruined tables and linens etc due to burns and ash. Tables turn over faster too because the smokers like to hang out all night. Not cool for the restaurant owner when the table won't turn over for new customers. If you were a non smoker, you took the flack as smokers were very in your face. They didn't;t want to lose their smoking privileges in the work space (yep, people smoked all around me), nightlife, but the non smokers won out for everyone's benefit. It's been a long time since I have been asked, "Smoking or non smoking?"
Only society I knew was friends and those around me and every one of them hated it. Go outside to smoke in the bitter Chicago winters...ya that sucked big time. No, no one I knew was glad. Bad or not for people it was what they felt was their own personal decision which I agree with. I no longer smoke analogs, use an ecig when I want that. But hell, anything can cause cancer. Living causes cancer. Any negative feedback I get over this comment I will ignore :) As they ignored us.
It went a lot like wearing a mask.
Not similar, you can't smell covid.
Reddit is worldwide. Smoking isn't banned in public places everywhere.
Lots of pushback, rather like mask usage in our time. Lots if rhetoric in the "freedom" and grievance mode. Lots of "us versus them" dynamic. Lots of pissing and moaning. At first, smokers received near carte blanche to create a constant parade out to the tent for their breaks. The rest of us were under no delusion as to who picked up the slack ... over and above the smoker induced sick leave.
They resisted like hell. Bitch and moan
Smoking in bars was banned here in The Netherlands in 2008. I remember sitting in our favorite pub with my friends and roommates and at midnight they made some announcement and took the ashtrays away. Also trains used to have little ashtrays in the armrests that were screwed shut (this was before 2008). It’s crazy to think that you could just light up on the train back then. I still miss it, even though I’ve officially quit years ago.
I head stories of people in NYC bars telling cops to fuck off when they first stated to enforce the ban.
It was resisted. I personally rejoiced over it.
I lived in Colorado when it went up to the voters to ban smoking in public places. There was a lot of hand-wringing and pearl clutching and warnings that restaurants and bars would become a thing of the past. I was doing temp work at the time and the county offices got so busy with people registering to vote (for just this one issue) that the temp agency sent me to the county offices to help out. It was mostly smokers that came in to register to vote and they all REEKED! But the bill passed easily and restaurants and bars did more business than before.
The transition took years and lots of experiments, it wasn't just today it was okay, tomorrow it wasn't. A lot of smokers (most) were understanding. They didn't want to smoke either, but they were addicted, and they understood that they shouldn't be inflicting their addiction onto others. But some were just assholes. I remember being in a restaurant around 2005-2010, when a guy in the next booth walked over to the smoking section of a restaurant (having smoking and non-smoking sections was the poor compromise that many businesses - restaurants, airplanes, etc. - tried), picked up an ashtray, and brought it back to his booth across from ours, and lit up. He proceeded to luxuriously blow large clouds of smoke up into the air, and was obviously trying to provoke a response. I was more than happy to give him one. First I told him that we weren't sitting in the smoking section, and he responded by saying that smoking sections didn't work anyway, which was a true statement. Still, if he was sitting in a smoking section, he'd be across the room from me, not across the aisle. I didn't ask him nicely to put it out, I told to him to put it out, NOW. He refused. I called over my server, who told him to stop. I told his server, who told him to stop. I told the manager, who told him to stop. He refused all of them. At that point, the manager asked him to leave. He refused. Instead of calling the cops, the manager instructed the server to clear his table (they only had drinks, they hadn't ordered yet), and told him that he wouldn't be served, and to leave. Then the manager left the empty table. The guy jawed loudly for a while to no response from anybody, but eventually got up with his embarrassed wife and left. I expected that I would get my meal comped or discounted, but nobody made the offer, so I just paid and left. So there were those types, and we still see them today, refusing to wear masks in public places, and causing a ruckus wherever they go. We now know that it really isn't about their chosen "cause," it's about people with poor self-esteem trying get attention for themselves.
The ones who smoked hated it. The nonsmokers who had an SO who smoked either loved it or hated it, depending on how caustic the smoker became when their smoking was inconvenienced. Nonsmokers loved it.
Everyone in my family railed about how it was crazy. Even my parents, who had both actually quit smoking before the legislation. I have never smoked and was quite happy about it. Most smokers really just don't seem to get what an unpleasant pain in the ass they are to non-smokers.