It’s really amazing just what extent people went to in order to smoke. Apparently people smoked on submarines for a while. And planes. And everywhere else. Smoking is just such a disease and it feels like only now are we kind of getting a handle on it.
Story time. Last summer I flew from ATL to SFO on a brand new Airbus. Pretty cool plane! Halfway across the count I had the obligatory restroom break. In the head, I noticed an ashtray. I was confused -- "smoking has been banned in planes doe decades. Why is there an ashtray here?"
I flagged down a flight attendant and asked them. Their answer was that yes smoking is banned, and it's a $250 fine. But EVERY SINGLE TRIP from ATL to SFO, someone decided it is worth it and the ash trays give them a safe place to put it out. The flight attendants wait outside the lav after the smoke alarm goes off with the ticket.
It's actually mandated by the FAA that an ashtray be present in the restrooms:
> (g) Regardless of whether smoking is allowed in any other part of the airplane, lavatories must have self-contained, removable ashtrays located conspicuously on or near the entry side of each lavatory door, except that one ashtray may serve more than one lavatory door if the ashtray can be seen readily from the cabin side of each lavatory served.
And the plane literally cannot fly with an inoperable or missing ashtray.
It's counterintuitive, but I've heard an explanation that the alternative - they decide to dispose their cigarette into the bin full of flammable paper waste - is much worse.
Possibly also: in toilets antifreeze such as methanol diluted in water can be used for freeze protection at low concentrations but is flammable and hazardous at higher concentrations.
If you're wealthy enough $250 is just the price of smoking (especially for someone that can afford a 1st class seat). I wonder why they don't have escalating non-monetary punishments?
You'd think they'd just ban repeat offenders.
Jim Simons got so tired of paying these, he bought a private plane to save money. To say he was a prolific smoker is an understatement.
Jim Simons, mathematician and hedge fund manager (1938–2024) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons
I assumed you were talking about who I know as james Simons, but just googled him to make sure there wasn't someone else, and yeah - first pic on Google is him with a cigarette. Also learned it was lung cancer that took him out, though he did make it to 86 which isn't bad.
Then there's George Harrison, who died of lung cancer way too young.
Gross.
> ash trays give them a safe place to put it out
ha. i always thought they were remnants from old airplane plans that were too much effort to update to remove them. thanks for that
The ashtrays are there, even today, because it is suspected that this flight [0] went down when someone disposed a cigarette butt in the lavatory trash, causing a fire.
A reminder that aviation regulations are written in blood.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varig_Flight_820
> A reminder that aviation regulations are written in blood.
It's enormously expensive for an airframe manufacturer to deal with the fallout of a crash.
There aren't any engineers in an airframe manufacturer willing to sign off on a faulty design. Some good engineers are so worried about that they get shifted to working on conceptual projects.
I took a loooong time for Boeing to convince the FAA that a twin engine jet was safer than a 4 engine for ocean crossings.
> took a loooong time for Boeing to convince the FAA that a twin engine jet was safer than a 4 engine for ocean crossings
I don't believe they convinced the FAA twin is safer, just that it meets the necessary safety margins. Airlines want them to meet that regulation for fuel efficiency, but I'd want a source that they're actually safe-er, instead of simply safe enough
Boeing proved it safer. The reason is the increased complexity of more engines increased the risk of a major problem.
My source is I was told this by the engineers who where involved.
Not necessarily safer but safe enough. A modern 4 engine jet should still be safer than the 2 engine equivalent
tldr for the wikipedia article:
this plane did not crash, it made an emergency landing 2 miles from the airport in an onion field. Only 10 crew and 1 passenger survived. The other 123 souls aboard died of smoke/CO inhalation from the fire.
the sole surviving passenger, 21-year-old Ricardo Trajano, disobeyed the instructions to remain in his seat.
Amazing that lighters are allowed in the cabin
> Apparently people smoked on submarines for a while.
More than ‘a while’. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4344412/:
“In the mid 1970s smoking was allowed virtually everywhere; by 2000 there were only two allowable smoking areas-each approximately 6 feet by 6 feet-one in the engine room and one up forward.
[…]
In 2009, a working group was established to prepare for a December 31, 2010 deadline for prohibiting smoking below decks on deployed submarines”
That paper also says:
“In 1993, based on reports of the dangers of secondhand smoke, Captain Stanley W. Bryant, the commanding officer of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, announced a ban on smoking aboard the ship starting in July 1993 and proposed eliminating tobacco from the ship's store. These actions elicited a strong and swift tobacco industry response. As described by Offen et al., tobacco friendly members of Congress challenged the policies and enough pressure was generated to force the reversal of both the ban on smoking and the prohibition of cigarette sales aboard the ship”
My time in submarines at sea just coincided with the last few years where smoking on submarines was still authorized.
It was awful, just awful. Especially in a space as cramped as a submarine and with a common ventilation system, you can't just put the smokers in a convenient spot all to themselves, they're always going to be near something the rest of the crew needs to access.
It was part of the culture in the 1960's, and only started to change somewhat during the 1970's. Everybody had ash trays, even in non-smoking households, so that you could bring them out for guests. Nobody gave it a second thought. Clay ash trays were common elementary school arts & crafts projects.
One of the things that reminded me of how much a part of the culture it was, is when we visited the Computer History Museum. The SAGE system display had several operator consoles -- each with an ash tray and an automotive-type cigarette lighter in the panel.
Several years ago I had a brief stop at some airport-- maybe Atlanta? But they had an indoor smoking area. I smoked at the time so I followed the map, and you could see the smoking area from the balcony on the floor above.
It was a glass cube maybe 10 feet across, and it was crammed full of people. Completely full, like those Japanese trains. And there was a crowd of people outside waiting to get in.
I went outside. It was pretty nice, there was no one around.
Cinemas were the annoying ones for me, even more so than airplanes. I remember going to see E.T. when it came out and the cloud of smoke from all the parents puffing away made it hard to see the damned screen.
I don't know if sailors can smoke on an aircraft carrier, but with all that gas and bombs around, it seems like a no-brainer to ban it.
As a former Air Force brat, I remember the horrific stench of stale smoke in the AF office buildings. My parents were about the only adults I knew who didn't smoke. I bought my 72 Dodge in the 1980's, and it still smells like cigarettes.
Of course there were smoking and non-smoking sections on airplanes. The same air recirculated through the entire airplane, and the non-smoking section began the very next row after the smoking section.
Fun fact, the air quality on aeroplanes got worse after they banned smoking, because they could cut costs by re-circulating the same air for longer.
Recirculated air is still a thousand times cleaner than air with cigarette smoke in it.
Air isn’t recirculated on an airplane. It’s continually brought in from outside the aircraft
50% is recirculated, 50% is from the outside. Before the 80's it was 100% from the outside, though.
That statistic doesn’t mean much.
The question is how long does it take for all the air in the plane to be replaced.
[dead]
Unfortunately we aren’t getting a handle on it because those friendly tobacco companies instead just pushed people to vaping instead.
on the contrary, I strongly believe that tobacco companies are the driving force behind the attempts to equate vaping and smoking. idk about the current year, but tobacco companies had little to no influence over the vaping market during its early years. the hardware was 5% American from small companies and 95% Chinese, the nicotine fluid had local producers everywhere because of how cheap and easy it is to make. almost all early adopters were people who wanted to quit smoking, and a lot of them succeeded.
and it's not harmless, sure, but it's definitely less harmful than inhaling combustion products of pulverized tobacco waste glued together with a mix of a hundred mystery chemicals.
Vaping has its share of mystery chemicals too, though
the flavorants are fairly mysterious, yeah. we know diacetyl is bad to inhale, we don't know how many others are. but if you DIY, only propylene glycol and nicotine are strictly required. vegetable glycerin and flavorants are optional.
I'd choose even the most mysterious Chinese bathtub e-juice over cigarettes though.
Or, maybe do neither?
I think the argument is that vaping is far more addictive for young people because of exactly what you say. Does not feel harmful and they end up very addicted at higher doses of nicotine than cigarettes
There are now vaping bans that have pushed people to pouches.
The pouches are a totally different level of nicotine addiction. People will fall asleep with one in.
And unlike cigarette butts, they stick to the parking lot. Lovely!
The pouches are great, a clean way to get Nic with very few adverse health problems as a result.
Nicotine has both positive and negative effects but the impact on hypertension can cause pretty serious adverse health problems for some heavy users.
absolutely not true
they erode your gums
and the accelerated rate of nicotine absorbtion probably has side effects we do not yet understand
Yeah, but nicotine itself can still be problematic for mental health. It really depends on what you consider an "adverse problem".
I had been using the pouches for a couple of years now, and the unbearable anxiety from its nonstop use caused me to slow it way down. I went from a can a day to less than a can a week. I had already quit all other forms of nicotine before the pouches. What a wild ride.
Because the anxiety is unlikely to just be from nicotine alone, I also got myself into somewhat better shape to cope. Maybe some anxiety is healthy if it drives better choices, but it still feels awful. I'm now glad with my current state, but I would not recommend this path to here.
That’s still getting a handle on it. Vaping is not good but it’s significantly better than the tar that comes from burning cigarettes
In the context of the alternative which was “nobody really smokes or vapes” it’s not really a good outcome.
Sure, smoking rates cratered. It was great. But now vaping rates have gone up and it just didn’t have to happen that way at all.
Go back a few years and less people vaped with similarly low smoking rates. Vaping didn’t replace smoking, its net new usage.
I'm not sure this is actually bad. Nicotine, when divorced from the tar of burning cigarettes, has a number of desirable affects on alertness and appetite (as well as less desirable effects like increasing blood pressure) - it's not clear to me that avoiding nicotine as a stimulant is always desirable.
As well, vaping is so much less obnoxious to the people around you than traditional smoking (either tobacco or marijuana). I'm in favor of a lot of the social and legal pressure that has been put on smoking tobacco in public (and I think it should apply to weed as well despite being pro-legalization). But most of the actual issues go away if it's vaping and of smoking (and all of them go away if you're getting your tobacco via a pouch).
I honestly still find vaping obnoxious and I’m clearly not alone here because most places that ban smoking also ban vaping too.
And weird for someone to talk about vaping like it’s a good thing when we already know there are adverse health implications from vaping. What we don’t know is just how serious that is. But why take the risk in the first place?
What adverse health implications from vaping are there?
Still being studied, but the idea that it’s safe seems to be a very odd default.
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/e-cigarettes/health-effects.html
Why would your default assumption be that putting foreign (and poorly regulated) substances into your lungs is more likely than not safe?
This is especially true since it’s a drug that doesn’t even have much claim to fame for positive recreational or medicinal benefits.
The vast majority of that CDC information page is about the health effects of nicotine itself. There's a relative lack of specific information about the health risks of the vapor. "Cancer-causing chemicals" is vague (I live in California, I see prop 65 signs all over the place, I ignore them like every good Californian). "Heavy metals" is also vague - is the amount of tin that I might inhale via vaping actually a problem? Is it significantly more than if I lived in an area with a tin mine or something?
I'm not claiming that vaping is safe in some absolute sense, it wouldn't be surprising if there are some meaningful health risks. I personally do not vape myself because the times I've tried it, I've found getting the vapor into my lungs to be very uncomfortable. But it does seem like it's a strict health improvement over tobacco smoke, given that the CDC can't articulate a specific harm to the lungs caused by vaping.
I’m not sure how you could possibly argue that nicotine has mainly desirable effects. Merely being highly addictive on its own is a pretty badly overriding negative effect.
Here’s a paper that talks about the negative impacts on a wide variety of organs: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4363846/
No, the context was getting a handle on smoking, not some alternative goalpost. As lung cancer rates plummet from lack of second hand smoke nobody should ever lament that even if people are doing something else not great.
Classic “perfect is the enemy of good”.
That’s a little like celebrating the reduction of heroin usage while ignoring that fentanyl addition has sky rocketed.
While I do agree that vaping is better than smoking. The real crux of the problem is the addition that needs treating. Celebrating the rise of vaping feels a little like celebrating an own goal. You’ve put all that time and effort into reducing the effects of smoking and yet you haven’t actually solved the underlying problem at all.
This isn’t “perfect is the enemy of good”, this is ensuring that tax money is spent on the right problem and not something more financially comfortable for companies producing these addictive substances.
It's also very dependent on where you live I think.
I'm in NY (not NYC) and it's rare to find anyone smoking.
When I visited Türkiye last year, I've never seen so much smoking in my life. Not just walking around the streets, but people smoking at restaurants that had seats outside. This could be a small place with 3-4 tables all within a couple of meters of each other.
Check the ancient shows Sex and the City and The nanny ... and you will see a different NY.
Yes, its incredible how much the culture around smoking changed in 25 years
It was one of my first thoughts too, but related to that somewhat is that it also amazes me how people used to be a lot more “daring” or “pragmatic” (the quotes indicating that I’m not quite sure what to call it) in a way that did not scare them to consider and weigh the risks and conclude that it was not only feasible and possible, but that it was also worth adding a smoking room to a hydrogen filled balloon.
There are many other similar examples of this “daring” that seems to have all but been neutered by globalist standardization that has all but destroyed actual diversity in the West and has seemingly lowered tolerances of and for risk.
I’m not sure if it’s quite the same and maybe it’s just a function of the technology levels of roughly up to the 1990s, but it feels like China in general has something similar to that same kind of “daring” today, based on the unique and innovative things I see in China.
I also suspect the modern digital news cycle and potential lawsuits have impacted the levels of risk acceptable. In China, with devastation in living memory, the population are generally willing to take more risks, and there's less of a culture of litigation. Plus, there's always the government who can dampen any viral social media outburst.
Of course, some standards (fire safety) are important. Looser standards are allowable where the customer can make a reasoned judgement of risk.
> adding a smoking room to a hydrogen filled balloon
Is it really all that different from an airplane filled with aviation gas? There are plenty of terrible crashes from planes that caught fire in the air, and just about every crash into the ground results in a terrific fire.
> It’s really amazing just what extent people went to in order to smoke.
My parents' generation, the boomers, weren't really aware that smoking was bad. Even if some knew, I feel like it was mostly hidden from them. Look at any movie they'd watch in the west when they were young, people would be smoking everywhere: inside offices, inside cars, public servants at the town hall, etc. Smokers everywhere.
Once the studies eventually came out showing how bad it was, addicted people kept smoking but there's been way less new smokers.
Now I see my kid's gen (so the grand-kids of the boomers): hardly anyone is smoking. It's not a thing among that generation.
As to the gen Xer who used to smoke: most of friends in that segment are now vaping.
Addicts are typically going to be addicts: be it alcohol or tobacco. We're getting a handle on it for the boomers are now dying left and right and it's been a long time smoking ain't being portrayed as being cool anymore.
A fun smoking story.
My dad, as navigator, flew 32 missions in B-17s over Germany. Many of his buddies were chain smokers. The problem was, you could not keep a cigarette lit at 30,000 feet. The crew all wore oxygen masks, as they'd die without one.
So what the smokers would do is, take a deep breath and unhook the mask. Then blow on the cigarette while lighting it. The cigarette would burn like a torch. Then take a deep puff on the cigarette. Put the mask back on and take another deep breath, while the cigarette sputtered and threatened to go out. Take the mask off and then blow on the cigarette to get it going again (like a torch).
My dad would laugh and laugh while he relayed this desperate dance to smoke.
I've never seen this story in books/movies about B-17s. So here it is for posterity!
> My parents' generation, the boomers, weren't really aware that smoking was bad.
As a boomer, I say "baloney".
For starters, my dad grew up in the Depression. His schoolmates called them "coffin nails". Doctors routinely prescribed "stop smoking, you fool".
In 7th grade, one of my teachers (incidentally, a Holocaust survivor), smoked constantly. He'd also spend half of class time coughing up a lung. My best friend in high school smoked constantly, and told him his doctor told him his lungs were damaged and he better quit. He kept smoking.
But the worst was when I was 8, and toured an agricultural museum at K State. There were two jars with lungs in them, one from a non-smoker, and the other a smoker. The non-smoker lungs were pink and looked healthy. The smokers - black! All black! It was horrific.
Besides, anyone who cut open a dead body knew instantly if the deceased was a smoker. No sane person would conclude the black, scarred lung was healthy.
All the boomers knew the bad effects of smoking. They just thought they were invulnerable.
it also did not seem to impact lifespan for them
dying in your 60s was par for the course until second half of the 20th century.
lead petrol, cigs, war, asbestos, lead paint in children bedroom
In the first half of the 20th Century war was the leading cause of a great many men and some women dying in their 20s and 30s .. and to a lesser degree at later ages (if in occupied territories, etc).
Dying young drags "life expectancy" figures (especially those calculated "from birth") but doesn't necessarily impact the likelihood of dying (say) "within the next 5 years" if you're already (say) 55.
Eg. Many people that survived war in the early 20th Cent still managed to live to a ripe old age past their 60s.
The boomers quit smoking decades ago.
I grew up mostly in a rural town, unwittingly away from lead gasoline fumes.
Kids today may think they're smarter than boomers because they don't smoke. But instead they smoke marijuana. There's nothing smart about that.
I’ve been told by someone who was in the service that when smoking was no longer allowed on submarines, it made a huge difference in the cleanliness of machinery and thus how much work was required to maintain it.
Yeah, I’d love some of that goodness in my lungs, please.