I’m not a fan of smoking. I don’t smoke, I don’t drink alcohol, and I don’t use any recreational drugs.
I don’t think you should either; but obviously that’s your business.
In this video I describe smoking from the Gen X perspective. In 1980, around 33% of the U.S. adult population smoked cigarettes. Smoking had not yet been banned from most public places. (These bans would not appear en masse until the 1990s.) Secondhand smoke was still very much a fact of life.
The wide availability of cigarettes was also a fact of life. When I was in the eighth grade, I regularly purchased cigarettes at a convenience store across the street from my school. The shopkeeper—a man of about fifty—had no illusions regarding my age. I entered the store wearing the uniform of the Catholic school I attended.
If you couldn’t find a store clerk or a shopkeeper to sell you cigarettes, you could always avail yourself of cigarette vending machines. These could be found in practically any restaurant, bar, hotel, or other retail establishment, usually near the restrooms and the pay phones.
At the same time, everyone knew that cigarette smoking was bad for you. That message had been widely available for around twenty years. There were also laws on the books against selling cigarettes to minors. We weren’t supposed to have access to them. But, hey—this was the 1980s, and things were a little more lax, to say the least.
Another thing that was different about cigarettes in the 1980s was the price. The last time I purchased a pack of smokes— sometime in early 1982—they cost $1.25. I haven’t bought them recently, but something tells me that they cost a lot more than that nowadays.
-ET