And plane and train.
It still smells of automotive exhaust. So they might have idea after all.
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!”
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.
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.
The difference is, the rest of them are not being force fed to those who don’t want it.
Cigarette smoke is literally poisoning the lifeline of humans [1].
and everything that interacts with the atmosphere, including my computer. How many times have I had to get gunk off of the dust filters and fans and I tend to seal my room a lot more than the normal person ↩︎
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.
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.
It’s still this way in the place where I live 😖
I hate nicotine so fucking much
They apparently found a cure for cancer.
But not for brain rot
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
I’m old enough to remember the same things on airplanes.
At least the airplanes were designed to pull smoke downwards, which reduced transmission rates for covid.
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.
More stress, tbh. We’re starting to see it swing back, a lot of millennials look older than their Genx counterparts at the same age
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.
Same experience in Paris a while ago. My sister was about to dig into her spaghetti when someones cigarette ash drifted onto it…
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.
At my work it constantly smells like cannabis because there’s a literal weed factory next door.
It’s great because I just blame my weed smell on the factory.
There’s more methane in the atmosphere now. It probably smells like a fart.
~~Methane needs 5-16PPM [PDF] to be detectable with human smell. Atmospheric Methane is at about 2ppm. So the vast majority of people would not notice a difference. ~~
nvm see below
You used to be able to light the rivers on fire too but Nixon helped ruin that.
Don’t worry, Trump is working hard to bring it back! Make Waterways Burn Again!
