away in a cloud of smoke

      Smoking, apparently, is coming back. Well, sort of. According to a recent New York Times article, the habit is once again becoming a display of coolness and power. It’s all over movies and popular music. There are even “cigfluencers” now. Smoking is becoming hip again.

      Not in my circles, it isn’t.

      Ever since reading the article, I’ve been trying to think: do I know anyone who still smokes? And after I go through everybody I can think of—the very few never-had-smoked and the much more common used-to-smoke—the answer is I don’t think so.

      It does seem a bit odd because I can clearly remember that time not long ago when pretty much all of us puffed away. I remember walking into offices where a literal cloud of smoke hung over the desks (granted, these were newspaper city rooms, where everyone also had a bottle of whiskey in the top right desk drawer, but you get the point.)

      Bars and restaurants back then were filled with smoke. Arenas and college classrooms were filled with smoke. Buses, trains and airplanes—airplanes!—were filled with smoke. Even doctors’ offices were filled with smoke.

      My lungs, too, were filled with smoke, which was a particularly bad thing for someone who has asthma. One day, back in the seventies, my wife convinced me to go see a doctor who might convince me to stop smoking and making my lungs even worse than they were. I went to the office of a Park Avenue internist, where, when I finally got to see the doctor, he was smoking the biggest damn cigar I had ever seen. He didn’t counsel me to stop smoking.

      Of course, at that time, there were ads in all the magazines where actual doctors, along with actual ballplayers, touted the various supposed merits of different kinds of cigarettes. Parliament was healthier, doctors said, the safer cigarette.

      Then, little by little, or maybe faster than that, we all stopped

      In the mid-1960s when many of us were starting to puff, nearly 43 percent of adult Americans smoked.  By the 1980s, that had fallen to 30 percent and by the 2000s, the percentage was down to 20 percent. According to the most recent survey, now only 11 to 12 percent of adult Americans smoke, an historic low. That’s a 73-percent decline over about half a century.    

      It happened not only because doctors stopped endorsing cigarettes, but the decline coincided almost perfectly with the 1964 warning by the U.S. Surgeon General that, as some of us may had suspected and tobacco companies had tried mightily to hide, smoking was bad for your health. It caused cancer. It caused lung disease.

      After the surgeon general’s warning, labels were put on cigarette packages. Public health campaigns were mounted. Smoking bans and advertising restrictions were instituted. Higher taxes on cigarettes and subsequent higher prices were designed to discourage.

      And it all worked. It even all worked outside the U.S. Not that long ago, smoking was still sort of popular, in places like Spain and Greece and France, and when Americans traveled there they noticed how much more common the habit was. But while Europeans still smoke more than we do, smoking is now banned in French cafes and on Greek ferries. To anyone visiting, smoking now seems significantly less pervasive over there.

      And in my limited circle, it’s not only less pervasive, it’s essentially disappeared. Just another example, I guess, of how we are no longer hip anymore.