I Truly Miss Our Tobacco Smoking Culture

Chickensoup

[Chickensoup]

I Truly Miss Our Tobacco Smoking Culture .

The paraphernalia. The rituals. The camaraderie. The cigarettes and cigars and pipes.

The rituals. The coffee and cigarettes. The pipe and brandy. The smoky jazz clubs. .

It was an age. In retrospect it added texture to our lives.

[stanne]

“I always thought the health issues were exaggerated”

There are some parts of smoking culture I mis, for sure, but no. I work in medicine. Smoking affects circulation in a terrible way. You have a cardiac patient and his or her issues are very negatively exacerbated by smoking. And they can’t just say I don’t smoke. They have to work with their doctors. Breathing difficulties- respiratory disease- cardiac weakness, extremity affects amputations

Lung cancer is only one possibility. The above is very common.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Quit cold turkey in ‘86.
Glad I did.

[Gay State Conservative]

I grew up in a household where both my parents smoked like chimneys. In fact they both were horribly damaged by cigarettes (lung cancer and COPD). Although you'd think that as a result the smell of cigarette smoke wouldn't bother me...but it does.Hugely!

Just sayin'....

[ConservativeInPA]

I don’t smoke, besides a good cigar occasionally. I’m tolerant of other people’s smoking, it doesn’t bother me. I hate government and government’s wasteful attempts to modifying people’s behavior. It is solely a personal responsibility issue to me. Take care of yourself because government certainly will fail to do so. If people want to smoke they need to be willing to live or die with the consequences. That’s freedom.

The free market will provide smoke free and smoke filled experiences for all. I’ll take a small, smoky, dive bar with live jazz any day over a sanitized, commercialized, generic and characterless bar.

Government really doesn’t care about you and your health anyways. It’s all about power and control, so much so that there doesn’t needs to be any sense of logic to it. Here’s a funny example from year’s past. I had a consulting gig in Bedford, Mass. When I used to travel alone for work, I made a habit of eating dinner at a bar so I could talk with people. Well, in Bedford at that time, you couldn’t be served food at a bar that allowed smoking. That’s ass backwards. It was a town ordinance. Masshole is still filled with eff’n leftist morons and people still smoke.

[Joe 6-pack]

In college I smoked Camel non filters. I started seeing a young lady who smoked Marlboro lights. The first time she came over to my dorm room we listened to some music and smoked. After she left I saw her white cigarette butt in my ashtray with just the faintest trace of her lipstick on it, which she had deliberately left positioned there to be seen.

I know it sounds goofy now, 30+ years later, but at the time it gave me this really good feeling like she had marked my dorm room as her territory.

[1Old Pro]

We are living longer for many reasons:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1040079/life-expectancy-united-states-all-time/

[EVO X]

I tangled with SheLion on some smoking threads back in the day. If she isn’t on the Freeper Hall of Freedom fame, she should be.

https://freerepublic.com/tag/by:shelion/index?brevity=full;tab=comments

[BobL]

“Add smoking on planes”

Long ago I read that smokers helped airplanes with fuel efficiency. Think about that one for a while.

It seemed that the tar in smoke would seal up the microscopic leaks around rivets and seals, and therefore the planes would steal less energy from the engines to stay pressurized.

By the way, SS and Medicare would not be broke today if people kept smoking at earlier rates, as smokers tended to die young and relatively quickly, compared to costs of people living into their 90s. That’s the main reason that Reagan’s reforms in SS didn’t wind up ‘fixing’ SS as was promised back then.

[KC Burke]

I did it all and also went through nasty cancer.

I can understand what you are saying however. I used to go to the very best tobacconist in the midwest and had a stock of great pipe tobacco and cigars after I got away from cigarettes.

Stomach cancer made me where I can’t drink normal roasted coffee anymore as well.

But along with wine and liquor I did all that to the hilt because I enjoyed it too much. Now it’s tea. I have perhaps 60 varieties of tea. Some days it is straight white tea, some days it is Russian tea blends with cherries and pineapple. This morning it is 195 degree water in Darjeeling. Complexity can be found in everything. You would not believe what exists in the world of harmonicas or writing instruments.

[Bon of Babble]

I never smoked - but came from a smoking family.

I particularly miss the smell of pipe tobacco - we kids played in a room where my uncle stored it and IMO it smelled wonderful. I burn a “tobacco and mahogany” scented candle to sort of recreate the smell.

Unfortunately, I put a lot of relatives in the ground b/c of smoking.

[KobraKai]

Good god no. Smokers have rightly been shunned in our society. Ya’ll stink! And you’re litterbugs, you think the ground you stand on is a garbage can. You think the road you drive on is your garbage can to flick your butts. In fact, there’s nowhere that is safe from your dirty stinky ciggy litter.

[telescope115]

I still have my humidor but it’s been many years since it’s had any cigars in it.

I don’t drink anymore either. Don’t miss getting high from it, but I do miss the delicious sting from that first sip of a dirty olive martini.

If it weren’t for coffee, I don’t think life would be worth getting out of bed.

Man, you and I could be blood brothers, except I gave both of my humidors to my son-in-law. He stores his pot in them…

I do miss those martinis🙁
Bombay Sapphire……mmmmmmm

[telescope115]

I lost a cousin to throat cancer from chewing tobacco…

[MeganC]

I truly miss opium dens, child labor, the town brothel, and sweat shops. They added texture to our lives.

[Herodes]

I’m part of a golf-4some that plays once a week. We all smoke a cigar during the round of golf (4 cigars a month).

It is a ritual...and it adds to the camaraderie of the group and the event.

I never could stand the smell of cigarettes...and no one in the group smokes cigarettes. A good, premium, hand-rolled cigar just seems to fit in with the event.

[DoodleBob]

I feel so superior about stomping out smoking.

Now if those fat people could simply control themselves...what could have POSSIBLY happened during the Reagan years?

[HighSierra5]

You oughta smoke a White Owl.

[Fresh Wind]

I always thought the health issues were exaggerated.

Tell that to my mom, I will always remember the sound of her coughing her lungs out as she enjoyed the first cigarettes of the day. I remember the last day of her life, she was on her deathbed breathing pure oxygen, and yet she still had to have those last cigarettes.

But it you really want to tell her that, you can tell it to her tombstone.

[telescope115]

It’s about personal responsibility- as long as we know the risks, we can accept the responsibility if it harms us. Choices we make.

[Pollard]

The camaraderie

It's still there among smokers who have to go to a dedicated area to smoke at work like I do. That special nod of fellow smokers.

Back in the day, it was sitting around the kitchen table for coffee, cigarettes and chit chat.