You didn’t. As a child you got sick a lot with respiratory illnesses and ear infections, and you went to school reeking of cigs. But you didn’t realize it because you were surrounded by it. The quality of what you ate was often not as good either, because your parents couldn’t taste their food. And we’re probably still dealing with the long term health effects without knowing it.
It’s also fun whe you have to scrape the nicotine stains off the windows and scrub the walls when you finally sell your parents home.
The epigenetic effects of this sort of damage take a couple generations to clear up. Gen alpha is probably the first one to widely grow up without these being a problem.
I was so thankful my grandparents’ house was sold to be torn down and rebuilt. There was zero chance that the house with windows NEVER open for 50+ years could have been cleaned or deoderized.
Being a non-smoker back then was a giant pain-in-the-ass at any workplace too because any smoker could and would take a break for a cigarette once an hour and then so would the manager and they’d get to be buddies but if you were known as a non-smoker you didn’t get a break because you “didn’t need one” I knew dozens of people, especially in healthcare, who took up smoking because that was the time to be social with each other and the managers.
This was an issue in the military too. The smokers would take their smoking breaks. So I started taking non-smoker breaks. lol
My husband tried to take an “apple break” when he was in the air force and his boss laughed at him. He just took up smoking again after that so that he could take the break.
When I quit smoking I refused to quit my breaks. It was just a shop, so it was a solo break, I would take a stick of incense and sit outside while it burned for five minutes. This was pre-smartphone and it was really peaceful.
Ha, I remember being a kid. I would be with my parents at a campground all Summer. We had a fairly small trailer. I remember one night there was a NFL(Patriots) game on and my parents and another couple were in the trailer watching. There was so much smoke that I felt like I was going to die.
I ended up screaming at them all. I think they were actually shocked at how angry and loud I screamed. They didn’t say a word. Turned off the TV, took a few things and left the trailer. They even made sure to keep the door open so the air would vent through the screen door.
My father died of lung cancer less than 10 years later in '89.
I grew up in a small town, and when I was 17, I signed up for the volunteer fire department in town. Part of the in-processing was getting a chest x-ray so they knew how fucked your lungs were before any exposure related to the position. Nurse asked me how much I smoked and thought I was lying when I (truthfully) said I didn’t. She said my lungs looked like I’d been smoking at least a pack a day for at least a year.
My mom and every step-dad smoked like chimneys, spent a lot of my childhood in bars when smoking indoors was still legal. I don’t know if the nurse was exaggerating the results, and I don’t have a copy of the x-ray from back then. I also picked up the habit myself around 20 in the military and smoked a pack to 2 a day until we found out my wife was pregnant with our first kid. We both quit cold turkey that day. I assume I’ll have lung or skin cancer at some point between all that childhood exposure, the damage I did to myself smoking for a decade, the aircraft fumes, and burn pit exposure from the military…and we didn’t worry about sunscreen like we should have in the 80s/90s either.
Trent Crimm, The Independent. I have a question, how many step dads did you had?
It really sucked when people could smoke anywhere. I remember so many times when I was at a restaurant just starting into a nice meal and suddenly all I could smell or taste was cigarette (or cigar) smoke. It was gross.
I also remember when airlines had a smoking section, which was usually the back several rows. I remember asking for a seat in the non-smoking section, and the one I got was one row in front of the smoking section; there was probably more smoke there than in the last row of the smoking section.
You washed your clothes a lot. And even worse for girls with long hair.
You would skip restaurants during busy times.
Sometimes you would carry an extra jacket in your car trunk to put on when going into a smokey place, so you could take it off and hopefully not have too much smoke smell on you if you weren’t going to shower soon.
My family smoked like chimneys. I closed myself in my bedroom and avoided un-necessary contact.
Great grandmother got emphysema and died.
Great grandfather got throat cancer, a tracheotomy, and died.
Grandfather got lung cancer and died.
Mom got cancer and survived.
Dad had a massive heart attack and died.A lot of people didn’t.
God only knows how. Any time I went somewhere with my parents the car windows were up, the aircon was off and they were both chain smoking.
They both died of smoking-related illnesses.
Childhood asthma, unfortunately. I was born in 1982 and basically everyone smoked everywhere here in the Netherlands. If you had a birthday, you couldn’t see across the room due to the smoke.
Because of it I had childhood asthma, which cleared up immediately when my parents stopped smoking. In the early 90’s, things got a lot better with smoke-free environments. We eventually got full on smoking bans, thank god. As far as I can tell, it didn’t do any permanent damage.
I still absolutely HATE smokers and smoking. It is and was an antisocial thing and children should never have been exposed to it like we were.
I thought smoking was still very common in Europe?
Well, Europe is a big place. The percentage of smokers differs from country to country, as well as the anti-smoking legislation and when that was introduced.
In the Netherlands, you cannot smoke in the workplace, restaurants, cinema, on public transport, near a hospital, etc. Sale of tobacco products is illegal to anyone under 18 and we’ve banned things like flavoured vapes.
Because of all these measures, ‘only’ 19 percent of the Dutch population 15 and older smokes, with people lower on the socio-economic ladder smoking more frequently. That’s below the European average of 19.7 percent.
Now, compare that to other countries like France (22 percent), Spain (23 percent) and Bulgaria (28 percent).
Now, those countries have anti-smoking legislation as well. But because they had statistically higher numbers of smokers, it takes longer to see the overall effect.
So depending on where you are in Europe, your perception of smoking habits could vary wildly.
Interesting. Years ago before I quit I rolled my own and the best lose tobacco I could find in the States was Dutch.
Funny how things change.
Well we are proud of Dutch manufacturing in general. We like to make good products, even if they might be bad for you: for decades, we had the best weed in terms of THC content. And the Netherlands is also a highly regarded global producer of XTC pills and amphetamines. There’s only so many tulips you can export…
So yes, loose tobacco is one of our fine export products. We Dutch also loved it; it was really popular to use in joints (see: Dutch weed) and rolling your own cigarettes tended to be cheaper than buying packs (we Dutch are notoriously cheap). These days people prefer a vape, or pure joint. And with smoking in general on the decline, loose tobacco is a rare sight here these days.
90’s kid with smoker parents. You made do with the migraines. It was the absolute worst in winter car rides on bright days. Blinding snow plus second hand smoke migraine and no rolling down the window more than a tiny crack. Pure hell.
Yes. Migraines. It wasn’t my parents but an early job in the late 80s. Dude next to me smoked so much it was a problem with fouling the equipment. We had to re-do jobs all the time for failure to clean the settled soot. I left the job and one of the reasons was the constant migraines.
Man, it was rough.
At family friends you’d take a break to get some fresh air or a bathroom break, as they smoked indoors and you had to be nice.
At restaurants I would push my parents for non smoking. One time they skipped that option and it impacted me so much I threw up all over the back seat.
They no longer opted for the smoking section ever again.
Workplaces were the worst, I kept catching other people’s second hand smoke at work. Worst was when I went to an encounter group type thing and a guy was smoking and I got a faceful… and bronchitis for the rest of the trip. And that was in the 90’s
At least in my own home and car I could set the rules and rules was take that shit outside
in the '90s*
Well at that age I was a baby so I was mostly close to the floor
We were just used to it, even as non-smokers. I grew up with my Dad always smoking and just always recognized the smell, but it was just so common that I didn’t think anything of it. It wasn’t until my state banned indoor smoking that it really hit me how everpresent it had been. It was like a few weeks after the ban went into effect that I really noticed it like, “Holy shit, I never realized how much I hate that smoke, it’s so much better now!” I was working at a bar/restaurant at the time, so it just cleared the fucking place up and I was so happy.
