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Comment by vonnieda | Hacker News Reader

Can you say where in the US you find it rare to see smoking in public? I live in Kansas City and have been in Vegas, Seattle, and NYC recently and there is plenty of smoking everywhere. Less than the 80s, sure, but certainly not rare.

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How recently were you in Vegas? I was blown away by how little smoking there was post pandemic even compared to 2018. Like, most casinos no longer reek of cigarette smoke. I'm sure that's partly explained by better air circulation installed to reopen sooner post-COVID, and probably taking the closures as an opportunity to replace some seriously steeped carpet, but the amount of smoking was way, way down. It used to be if you saddled up to craps table, at least one, if not two people would be actively smoking. Now you can look around the entire pit and not even see one. The combination of anti-smoking measures in broader society, and the uptake of vaping has wildly reduced the amount of smokers. We're talking a 60% reduction since 2000, and that was after the trend was already heading that direction.

Compare that to most places internationally, and the contrast is stark. The US has less than half the cigarette consumption per capita than the EU, with only the U.K., Norway, and Sweden having lower rates. China has a similar rate to the EU.

Just to drive that point home a little harder, the state with the highest number of smokers is West Virginia, sitting at 21% (the national average is 9.6%). That would be middle of the pack in Europe, similar to Italy.

I was in Vegas in August for Def-Con and there was a ton of smoking. Our hotel’s casino/lobby was disgusting. The smokers area outside the convention was plenty busy. Walking to the monorail there were people outside most hotel back doors smoking.

Which reminds me: Also, the smoking area of every airport I’ve been to in the last 2 years has been thick with smokers.

I know it’s better than the 80s. I was there. But I don’t think it’s rare in the US at all.

rare compared to Europe where seemingly everyone smokes

Rare as in you can absolutely spot a person smoking sometimes, but there is not the perception that everyone is smoking, the air does not always smell like cigarettes on the streets and even inside businesses, and the ground is not covered in cigarette butts everywhere.

NYC vs Hamburg, Amsterdam, or Brussels are night-and-day differences on this point.

I'm not sure Vegas is representative of much of anything, but last time I was there what I smelled was weed, not tobacco.

In my daily life, every day, I am behind cars with people smoking, see people on their smoke breaks outside the doors of offices and retail, walk behind people on the sidewalk smoking, and see it on basically every job site I pass.

I only bring this up because I keeping seeing people say it's "rare" in the US, but is something rare if you run into multiple times every single day?

The price of cigarettes varies widely around the US, which may affect demand. Though I thought VA is a tobacco state.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/smoking-r...

I guess we can keep arguing about the definition of rare, but about half the smoking rate of many European countries is pretty significant, and immediately noticeable walking around cities in both places. It's also a significant reduction in the US since the 90s, when every restaurant and workplace, and decent number of homes, smelled like cigarettes.

I loved Amsterdam but the amount of litter, composed mostly of cigarette butts was eye-opening.

Rare in the northeast US. In fact, I saw two students smoking on a college campus just last week and did a double take. I had not seen a single student smoking in at least a decade. Then I laughed remembering how when I was in college in the 90s, almost everybody smoked at least a little (often at parties), and seeing students smoking at the entrance to the dorm was pretty normal. I am an asthmatic so I've never smoked, and I remember my friends being stunned by this one night when we were out at a bar. Things have changed a lot around here.

In my college dorm in the 70s, nobody smoked. Well, there was one. He got a lot of pressure from the rest of us, because it stunk up his room and the hall. He finally gave in and moved elsewhere.

Maybe smoking trends come in waves.

I think this is a case of rare being relative to the past.

In the 90s and earlier it was hard to be in a city and not be breathing cigarette smoke pretty much constantly. Offices had ashtrays in the elevator waiting areas for people who couldn't wait to get to their office, restaurants had half the seating reserved for smokers, there were ashtrays in the armrest of every single seat on an airplane.

Its kind of crazy how much norms have changed around smoking in public. It's not "rare" to see a smoker, its that it is much rarer than it was in the past.

Idk if it would call it rare because yeah going on a walk in a downtown area you will definitely see at least a couple people smoking. But 30 years ago it seemed like every other person you passed on the sidewalk was smoking.

I remember walking into buildings in the 1960s and they all stank of stale cigarettes. Not at all today.

The massive shift away from cigarettes is incredible. I didn't believed it possible.

DC suburbs here, I can’t remember the last time I saw someone smoking.

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