Smoking cigs... do you? Does your friends and family? (pregnant, insurance, men)
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I use to be an ardent smoker... for 20 yrs. Then a major health problem hit me and I had to quit.
I haven't had a cig in over 20 yrs.
I still remember the absolute joy of smoking (as only a smoker will understand) but am so glad that I don't anymore. The cost of 1 pack of cigs (25) costs around $12 and up. I remember paying $6 per and considered it expensive.
You also become a slave to the "next" cig. You plan and center your actions around getting the next cig when you are at work etc. And God forbid if you ever run out of cigs... I NEVER did because I bought them by the carton.
Most of my friends / family who smoked quit a while ago. One quit and picked it back up because his job is on the road all day and stressful.
So how many of you smoke cigs? How many per day? Do you ever intend to quit? And is it an expensive habit for you?
Do your friends smoke? Your kids?
I think that a lot of younger people don't smoke cigs anymore... just vape and marijuana. The general rule is that if a person doesn't get hooked on smoking cigs before turning 18, chance are they will never get hooked.
I was pondering this question because it seems that big tobacco is going to lose a lot of market if the younger folks don't pick it up or if us older people quit in droves.
I never smoked, neither did the vast majority of family and friends. I'm usually surprised if someone excuses themselves to go out and smoke, because who *does that* anymore?
I smoked when I was 18-20, then quit when I found out I was pregnant. Then again for a while in my 30s when I dated a heavy smoker and unfortunately got sucked back into it. I'm in my 40s now and will never smoke again. Nasty.
Vast majority of smokers I encounter nowadays are men over 40 that look like they just wrestled in a pool of oily mud - probably mechanics, construction, farm labor, etc. I also often see restaurant workers out on smoke breaks behind the building or in an alley. Specifically restaurant workers, all ages. Haven't really noticed that at any other type of business.
Who cares if "big tobacco" loses? It's an unhealthy, smelly product. But with that said, I think if a business wants to allow smoking in their establishment they should have that right, particularly bars/clubs. Tobacco is still a legal product. There's one dive bar in my area that still allows indoor smoking. There were a couple others but they both banned it in recent years.
I don’t even know anyone who smokes. Growing up, my dad was a very heavy smoker—mom said probably 4 packs a day. It left me with an intense dislike of the habit.
Knowing what we do now about tobacco, plus the crazy cost, I don’t understand why anyone would start.
I smoke cigars occasionally but cigarettes, only once a year. No one in my family smokes, and the one time a year I smoke cigarettes is when I get together with an old friend. We tend to binge smoke for the weekend like we are still in our 20's and then thats it until the next year. When I did smoke in my 20's, it wasnt because I was addicted, it was because I enjoyed it.
Interesting thread. When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, the majority of people I knew smoked. Right now, at age 74, I don't know well a single person who smokes.
I grew up post WWII and nearly everyone smoked nearly everywhere.
Looks like MN has done a good job of lowing their usage. We've been under the national level for years now and have dropped 5% in the last three years. The trend appears hopeful and was given a huge boost by its emphasis in school lessons.
Something I have curiosity about is that when the state still had one fourth of its adults smoking it was very rare to see anyone smoking at all. Addictions tend to go underground depending on the amount of disapproval surrounding them.
The price for smoking in public in MN is public verbal abuse and other shaming behaviors. It's rather ironic as we seem to have learned that shaming behavior for addiction can increase the problem and are learning to refrain from it in other areas of health. It does seem to work very well at keeping the level of public smoking down.
But I wonder about private smokers. How are our smokers are being counted and how many may be invisible to statistics gatherer? Are they self-reported? Counted from medical/insurance statistics? How close to accurate is the count?
Nope. I worked in a tobacco factory blending and flavoring tobacco for cigarettes. It's a hot, smelly, dusty process. Workers step on tobacco leaves dropped on the floor and then toss them back on the production conveyor belts. I got a free box of cigarettes every day and as a supervisor I got a carton every other week and never opened a single one. My best friend's mother probably died early though because she and I gave all of our cigarettes to her.
You also become a slave to the "next" cig. You plan and center your actions around getting the next cig when you are at work etc.
We have some friends that smoke, but we don't. We have ashtrays outside for them when they come over, and that's usually where we hang anyway. Most vape.
We have very close friends that are both smokers, and we took them on vacation with us once. Never again. Every time we turned around, they had to go smoke, or we had to sit outside so they could smoke, or they had to roll down the windows in the rental car to smoke, messing up my hair. I was driving and the contract was under my name so I put the kibosh on that, but the rest we dealt with, although by the end of the vacay we were leaving them behind and telling them where to meet us, since they would also pop open a beer and sit while they had that ciggie, while we were waiting to go somewhere.
To this day, I don't think they ever even thought of how inconvenienced we were by their ridiculous habit.
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