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Friends and I love to dance to live music, and back in the day this was often in a local bar, where people were drinking and smoking. It was policy to remove our clothing outside to let it 'air out' rather than bring that smoke smell into the house. Of course we were all dancing HARD, in a smoke filled rooms. I wondered if I was in training to be a fire fighter, or what?
I remember going out at night then leaving my jeans on my bathroom floor, then in the morning the whole bathroom would smell like an ashtray. It was the worst!
Unfortunately it's still like that at my in-laws houses. Whenever they send our kids birthday or Christmas presents in the mail, we have to air out the packages for a few days.
I remember when the smoking ban was introduced in the UK and the smell of smoke in pubs and clubs was replaced by the stench of body odour, I was actually wanting smoking to return as it was a more tolerable smell!!
Either I've got used to it now or people have learned to wash because I don't notice it anymore!
It was sick near me, the pubs now clean up properly.
Did not miss having to dodge cigs at waist height on dance floors though.
It's still this way in the place where I live 😖
I hate nicotine so fucking much
I'm so glad the USA had such a strong anti-smoking campaign when I was young.
Well let's just hope the tobacco industry doesn't get the good idea to cut Elon or Trump a check...
Vapes are way more popular with younger audiences though. I don't think tobacco companies care about getting more people hooked on cigarettes anymore, and they don't need government help to make vaping more popular.
One of the few things America has done unambiguously right is the strong anti-snoking campaigns. I think my mom is the only smoker I know anymore
It's so good that most of the og tobacco barons are dead and don't have much power, otherwise current admin would be introducing mandatory smoking right about now
I did say it was one of the few, and vaping did kinda take its place for a lot of young folk
And it made about as much sense as having a pissing section in a public pool.
I remember in the early-mid 90's going to pizza hut with my family to cash in one of those sweet book club free pizza stamps and the smoking section always being packed with other families. The other kids would be playing and having a fun time while all the adults enjoyed their refreshing delicious cigarettes while everyone ate. There was no real, "smoking or non-smoking" section. It's was a smoke filled restaurant with the option to sit shoulder to shoulder with someone smoking a cig or being a few feet away from said smokers.
I remember going into cafés and things when I was a young man about 14 years old… You wouldn’t be able to see across a small room for the sheer fog bank of cigarette smoke.
We didn’t think anything of it
Experienced this when I went to Barcelona a few years back. Lovely city, but stepping out into the street felt like stepping into a cigar bar.
I don't mind it in the streets. I mean, as long as it's outside it's okay.
However, I remember a hotel in Spain where clients would be allowed to smoke indoors. It was hell.
I tie it to Germany. I remember getting off the plane the first thing I got hit with was the smell of cigarette smoke. And then wandering through parks and seeing kids smoking with their parents.
You should go to Cologne (or I bet any other major city), now it's weed smell everywhere 😂
Same experience in Paris a while ago. My sister was about to dig into her spaghetti when someones cigarette ash drifted onto it...
A smoking section in a bar is like a peeing section in a pool.
You used to be able to light the rivers on fire too but Nixon helped ruin that.
I wonder if our current world has a specific smell that people from the 80s would notice
Cannabis. At least most major cities in Europe/North America I find it really common now to openly smell cannabis all hours of the day. Combination of the strains being MUCH stronger and legalization. Even just 20 years back, of course in the Haight in SF or certain parts of NYC you'd smell it, or outside clubs/bars at night. But today I walk through Downtown SF at 830am and smell it every other block. Was in the design district in NYC a few weeks back and same deal.
It's common, but absolutely not omnipresent the way cigarette smoke was. Even now it's quite distinctive and noticable, even if common.
Helps that most people don't smoke a pack of joints every day.
There's more methane in the atmosphere now. It probably smells like a fart.
~~Methane needs 5-16PPM [PDF] to be detectable with human smell. Atmospheric Methane is at about 2ppm. So the vast majority of people would not notice a difference. ~~
nvm see below
methane doesn't have an odor, you linked to the data sheet of trichlorofluoromethane, a completely different molecule
The gas in your house is artificially made stinky so that people would notice leaks and blow their house up, which happened a lot back when the stinky chemicals weren't added and it was odorless
People from the 40s would recognize the current smell of the world.
I feel like it’s probably the people from the ~1880s-1920s would know the smell of the world today
I'm hoping car exhaust takes that role.
Smoking rates were around 40% up through the 1970s. If you didn't smoke, you almost certainly got it second hand. Which implies that up through the smoking bans of the 1990s, everyone (except maybe some farmers and other outdoorsy types) were on a psychoactive drug 24/7 at least a little.
I mean sure, nicotine is technically a psychoactive drug. But so is caffeine and theobromine, so should we stop giving kids chocolate? Ban all coffee shops? Honestly not sure what your point is here. Everything is drugs, at least a little.
That basically is my point. It's eye opening for people who don't think about drugs that way.
Ah okay i misunderstood. Regardless there were far more harmful things influencing everyone in the 70s than nicotine, like the thousands of toxic additives and carcinogens in secondhand smoke, or the lead in the paint and the gasoline.
It still smells of automotive exhaust. So they might have idea after all.
Look at pictures of people in their 30s back in the 70s, and compare them to people in their 30s today. It's a massive difference, I hypothesize that it's the leaded gasoline and secondhand smoke that makes it although I'm not aware of any science to back that up.
Probably a lot of it was first hand smoke.
There is a lot of science to back it up, but all of it is on the opposite direction (those things cause aging), and we can't really tell if the aging we saw was caused by any of them or if there was something else going on.
I remember when I was a teenager working in restaurants during high school I’d come home and shower afterwards. when I’d wash my hair it’d reek of cigarette smoke because I’d spent the last 5-9 hours standing in a giant plume of it.
I picked up smoking in college, I wonder if that was a factor. Thankfully I quit, eventually
We visited friends in Serbia in summer. It took me back to this smoking world I had long forgotten. Inside smoking and non smoking tables in crowded cafes side by side. And the craziest part was the indoor playgrounds for kids with cafes adjacent or part of it where you could also smoke (and buy hard liquor). But you know what, my kid could play for less than 1,5€ an hour on a rainy day, even when I lived in Munich there were like 2 indoor playgrounds in a 50 km radius and they cost a fortune. They had them everywhere for dirt cheap. So, I'll happily get off my high horse.
And plane and train.
It used to be a constant conversation when we would go out to eat. My dad would say, “I think someone is smoking in this section!”
Reminds me of this ancient story I saw making the rounds on Reddit a few years ago: https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2003/12/07/DJs-mummified-body-found-in-club-wall/72001070836281/
