When I was a kid, back eons ago, smoking was everywhere. People who didn't smoke had ashtrays for guests. Telling people to not smoke was simply not a thing. When I was about 16, some family friends put a small sign on their front door requesting people not smoke inside their house. I was shocked. I liked the idea, but I'd never seen that before, never even considered it. I recall wondering how many people would be offended enough to stop visiting.
Yeah, I'm just barely old enough to remember flying when you could smoke on planes.
It was everywhere. The smell of stale cigarette smoke was in nearly every public space. This was in the 80s in the US, so smoking was already in decline, but the smell was still this constant background presence.
I remember flying in the 80s (and early nineties in parts of Europe) and always got 'air-sick' which made flying awful. Only after smoking was banned did I realise I wasn't motion sickness but it was instead poisoning from the smokers around me. My parents would book non-smoking seats and we'd be 1 row in front of the smokers...wild times
I remember a discussion whether it was rude to lit a cigarette at the dinner table before everyone had finished their meal or not.
I remember this. Ashtrays were practically part of the furniture (especially coffee tables), even if you didn't have a smoker at home.
Elementary school children would make ashtrays as gifts for Father's Day.
If dad didn't smoke, surely he had guests who did.
Yeah. I remember that too. It was such an odd thing to make at schools and kids clubs. But that’s through the lens of modern life.
I vaguely remember living room chairs with built in ash trays (like how some have cup holders now).
And in the late 90s, being on a plane and the chairs had a metal folding door on the armrest that exposed an ash tray. Smoking on planes was already gone or going away, but the hardware lingered for quite some time.
Think these bins persisted on some aircraft until fairly recently. Maybe 10 yrs ago?
Ha my first ceramic project in elementary school art class was an ashtray. Smoking was everywhere.
As was passing out cigarettes and cigars to all the guests, didn't see this so much in the USA but very common in Europe even into the late 1990s.
So true. My parents would bring out ashtrays when we had guests.
It makes you wonder how accurate the smoking cancer stats are. IF everyone smoked, presumably this means a lot of people who are not recorded in the stats despite smoking or former smokers, lowering the mortality rate or risk factor, although obvious smoking is still bad.
I would expect it to be the other way around.
If nearly everyone smoked, then even nonsmokers were constantly getting a fair amount of secondhand smoke.
This would raise the background rate of cancer, making it appear that smoking raises your risk by less than it actually does.
Non smokers did get lung cancer [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Castle#Illness_and_death
Yes, exactly my point.
If the "normal" rate of lung cancer is X, the observed rate in nonsmokers who get secondhand smoke is X+Y, and the observed rate in smokers is X+Y+Z, if you compare nonsmokers and smokers it looks like smoking increases your rate by Z when it's actually Y+Z.
this agrees with my point because non-smoker are being counted in cancer risk. we're only interested in people who choose to smoke. public smoking bans make secondhand smoke less risky/relevant as a factor. we're only interested in the risk , independent of secondhand smoke, of someone choosing to smoke getting cancer.
> we're only interested in the risk , independent of secondhand smoke, of someone choosing to smoke getting cancer.
No, that's where you're wrong.
You are only interested in that independent risk.
I, and many others, are interested in how much smoking changes that risk.
Picking random numbers, let's say smoking gives you a 10% chance of lung cancer. It's fine for you to only care about that 10% number, you get to care about what you want to.
But for the rest of us, when making informed decisions based on risk, it matters whether smoking changes it from 9.9% to 10%, or 0.1% to 10%.
About 1/2 of all people who ever died from smoking-related causes were non-smokers.