Smokers

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I heard it's a complete myth that a longtime smoker's lungs regenerate/heal themselves after quitting.

My parents smoked, and the smoke used to float inside through the front door. Every so often I get the urge to have a smoke/breathe in cigarette smoke.

You walk into my grandmothers house and it's the first thing that hits you. My parents moved into her old house and we're still having a hard time getting the nicotine out of the walls.

I would have a hard time being with a smoker. Especially if children were on the cards - I don't want them getting cigarette cravings without even having smoked once.

Definite no-no for me. Smokers are the first thing I eliminate on dating sites. Don't want to be breathing or smelling that. Kissing a smoker leaves a terrible after taste too if you don't smoke.

I don't know. I remember when I stopped the first time, I was able to run harder and run longer when going out jogging or running. I was able to run 5 miles pretty easily at one point.

smoking and intelligence

No way. I don't like the smoke, and all that.

I don;t think smoking is a good reason for breaking a relationship or a marriage. If you truly love someone more than yourself, things like that are barely a blip on the radar. I'd pray for the woman in my life to quit, and refuse to be around her when she's damaging her lungs...but the final choice is up to her. As hard as this principle is to live out, the truth is that love doesn't demand its own way.

Extremely unlikely. I really hate cigarette smoke. I also hate the people that are inconsiderate enough to smoke at me. I suppose if she smoked very rarely (and never around me) and was absolutely wonderful in every other way I could imagine it happening, but generally speaking - no.

Yep! If she started smoking knowing that I can't stand it (which she would certainly know) that would mean that, at best, she couldn't care less about me any more and, at worst, she actively wants to hurt me. That alone would seem like a good enough reason to break up. Of course, it would be a bit more complicated than that in practice - obviously I wouldn't break up with someone after she smoked just one cigarette.

Just wanted to say I agree with you^.

I do the same thing, using the cigarette to blot out or compete with unwanted smells.
I live in an apartment building, and the odors of other people's food/cooking comes into my apartment-
it really bothers me. I use smoking cigarettes to cover over those smells, because I strongly dislike most food odors.
I have incense sticks, but they are too intense and concentrated and perfume-y for me to use often or burn all of at once.

FWIW: some people say they love the smell of wood smoke or a BBQ-and I loathe those smells.
I react to them like how others do to cigarette smoke (which doesn't bother me so much)-it hurts my eyes & nose.

To answer the original question, yes I would date a smoker, since I am one-
though I'd prefer it be only a moderate amount.
I smoke a dozen clove cigarettes a day
(I assemble them myself, since the product was banned in this country).

And being 420-friendly is a bonus...but this thread isn't about that

I'm a smoker and have dated smokers and non-smokers.

Obviously. the non-smokers who are attracted to smokers (NB: not attracted to them because they smoke, I hasten to add) that I have encountered have been from among the less militant wings of the ever-swelling and (quite frankly) ever-more-loony congregation of the Righteous International Church Of Christ, Non-Smoker.

I think the most extreme form of discrimination I faced from any non-smoking partner was being made to smoke in the garden (well, when the weather was nice, but it was all right to smoke indoors if it was a bit rainy or chilly.)

While it was inevitable that pubs and clubs would have to be brought into line with UK laws on smoking in the workplace, the smoking ban should be amended imho along the lines practiced in (for example) Spain, where the law is anti-smoking but premeses can apply to opt out. This pays the correct capitalist respect to market forces (tongue in cheek emoticon).

For months before the smoking ban came in, non-smoking punters crowed and gloated in the faces of innocent smokers, about how they and their families would soon become regular pubgoers, once the pernicious weed was vanquished. A brave new dawn of 21st Century Pub Culture beckoned.

But what happened? Smokers were forced outside into beer gardens by the pubs lucky enough to have them. As 2007 drew on, increasing numbers of smoking pubgoers -- sick of sitting out in the cold -- drifted away as the supermarket introduced special deals to tempt them away to drink at home .... where of course they could also smoke umolested.

Pub attendance fell through the floor and the Landlords behaved as capitalist bastards usually do in this type of situation: They ramped up the price of their beer while slashing the income of their tenant landlords., with the now-depressing situation that 100 pubs are going to the wall every week of the year, because the price of beer (approaching if not already exceeding£5 a pint in some inner London areas) coupled with sky-high rents on tenant landlords (to make up for the decreasing amount of beer they were elling) which combined to the threaten the loss of hundreds of centuries-old village pub which were now too expensive to maintain

As population that was only village-sized, depriving dozens of English villages of their community hubs and social and special leisure centres and community forum, leaving life-pubgoers with no meeting places community foriums, once livelhy witn debate in whicjh complaints could be lodged with Corones and Excise Men. The rapidly agenig country pub customer base left in droves and -- like the rest of us-- started drinking and smoking much more cheaply at home, having stock up at the supermarket offering the cheapest bulkbuy drinks deals and promotions.

The English pub is dying on its arse. I doubt that my grandchildren (should I have any) will know what a pub was: It will have long since been consigned to the oubliette which swallowed such former commonalities as stagecoaches, periwigs, slavery and farthingales.

There may still remain a chain or two of plastic family-friendly eating barns, scattered across the country, selling American style food and calling themselves 'pubs' on the basis that they sell warm white wine by the overpriced glass and display a range of piss-weak foreign beers (in bottles), but no-one will be deceived.

I will miss them. They were smoky dens of mystery, in which shady deals were finalised between dodgy local businessmen over all day lunches,, where furious women arrived looking for their still-not-home husbands, resulting occasionally in F on M violence of astounding ferocity (the issue being, I appreciated later, the fate of the housekeeping money), gamblers splashed out on trebles all round to celebrate a rare win, spending the rest of the year hunched at the bar with an ever-lasting pint of bass and a copy of Racing Weekly (that he studied like a cryptologist, but rarely solved) squabbling children running back and firth (in the face of repeated threats concerning banishment to the garden , which before the expulsion of the smokers' was only opened twice a year (St Georges Day, before the red cross was co-opted by fascists, for summer barbeques to mark the Queen's birthday), men who were too drunk to continue to gamble, fell to blows over disputes concerning trivial sums and took wagers and invited bets on their subsequent boxing match (which never appeared, probably due to the gentle persuasion of the landlady); and on Friday bedlam descended as seemingly the entire local workforce would invade the town at seven pm sharp, to drain vast quantities of beer, ale, spirits after clocking off on earlier, going home and dressing up smart,, knowing that they had Saturday morning to recover. Despite being banished to the car park ("because children aren't allowed in pubs") I wondered unmolested through the fierce chaotic beauty of it all, clutching my Corona "Golden Lemonade" and Golden Wonder Cheese n Onion.

All gone now, quite gone. And the villages are filling up with wealthy incomers as the last of the villagers died off. The pubs are attempting to reopen as 'Bistros' or 'Carveries' -- and who knows, perhaps the sudden influx of business-wage levels of disposable income will keep them afloat for a while. But the character of the English village, centered around its communal pub is dying out, and even the traditional peals of church bells have been complained about by the new generation of villagers, leading to Noise Abatement Orders being served and now the church bells, which beat out the rhythm of the village's life for centuries, hang silenced.

So I say: Bring back smoking in pubs (or at least some of them). Let's witness the magic of The Free Market in operation. Non-smokers smugly swore that they would become the 21st Century's 'Regulars', but when the appointed time rolled round and the last ashtray was sadly locked in the cellar for a future publican to wonder at, the non-smoking pub phenomenon simply disappeared, like (one is tempted to say) a puff of smoke. They got their cranky anti-enjoyment health-at-all-costs legislation and the result is that they have brought to its knees a form of establishment almost as British in character as the Monarchy itself.

One does simply not go to the pub for the good of one's health, and the sterile and characterless hollow shells of once-thronged pubs need to be allowed to throw open their doors once more to welcome the exiled population of smoking drinkers, who have been confined for some years now to the twilight world of supermarket lager, cut price 'booze cruise' tobacco and the ever-diminishing charms of the weekend TV schedules -- a scant substitute for a thriving subculture cast adrift by its own lawmakers.

I want a world or wit,, of wickedness,, of overflowing booze, perilously-dangling fag-ash , clandestine assignations and a culture in which any man (and it was usually a man) who -- defeated at the races, browbeaten by his boss, chained to a job he loathes and married with on terms that only barely counted as 'civility' -- felt his step quicken as he jingled his coins in his pocket, as he headed to his second home, where he could perch at the bar and (for an hour or two at least) feel the King of his own domain.,

That was a beautifully written post - honestly.

Now, looking past the form of what you wrote and into the substance of it: you say that banning smoking in pubs indirectly reduced drinking, violence and gambling as well. Yes, that sounds terrible!

Thank you. I blush.



Ha! As if!

Britons have historically demonstrated a preference for gambling and alcohol (and for violence, often arising from alcohol abuse) but in recent years these have assumed the proportion of being social problems of the first magnitude.

Ironically, these problems have tended to be exacerbated by uncharacteristically 'enlightened' (i.e., socially-liberalising) legislation enacted by the same Labour Government (which was otherwise distinctly authoritarian) that introduced the smoking ban (as set out in The Health Act (2006)).

In each case, general ideas in circulation among Labour MPs' social circles (or originating with self-appointed visionaries) ultimately became such widespread items of received opinion that they were adopted as Labour Party positions (official or otherwise), and sometimes got as far as being accepted by party policy-makers, who firmed them up into concrete proposals, which were then drafted as Bills, put before Parliament and (despite being hotly debated by MPs) were -- thanks to Labour's Parliamentary majority -- passed almost automatically (and frequently with minimal amendments) as Acts of Parliament and (after bouncing around the House of Lords) eventually became law.

This process was typified by a minimal standard of policy-specific sociological research, a minimal (or perhaps non-existent) level of influence by relevant expert bodies and individuals (see ongoing drug-related policies, supposedly advised by experts in the field who consistently and overwhelmingly recommend decriminalisation), especially evident when their occasionally-adverse opinions on the proposed laws were simply ignored (except in the notable case of the Health Act, perhaps because relevant professional and academic opinion was already overwhelmingly on the Government's side -- indeed some of those consulted wanted the Health Act to go even further than it did), campaigns of public promotion that usually focused on the projected (or wholly imagined) positive financial outcome for consumers and businesses (and therefore for the Exchequer), the whole process being carried out from start to finish with chief regard being paid (sometimes in explicit terms) toward the popularity of the proposed law among the electorate.

To take the given examples of gambling and drinking:

The Gambling Act (2005) was proposed to bring in a new regulatory framework in line with modern social aspects of gambling, in which gambling would be overseen with particular attention to its potentially-negative outcomes for individuals and society as a whole, and especially concerning its influence upon children. However, the Act's unintended outcome was the shrewd exploitation by gambling organisations of the Act's various legal weaknesses and blind spots, which have resulted in three major outcomes

1) The explosion of high street betting establishments housing fixed-odds betting machines, due to the relaxation of previous restrictions on the form. These establishments tend overwhelmingly to set up in areas of socio-economic deprivation, where the average individual on a low income (including those reliant on social security payments) gambles away -- i.e., directly loses -- over £1,000 a year, even when average winnings are taken into account (this tendency among the country's poorest is complicated and not directly-relevant here, except in so far as they are identified as a lucrative market by betting companies)

2) Legislation-specific loopholes and oversights that mean that gambling organisations in general, and high street betting shops in particular, have become unpoliceable as venues that present easily-accessible opportunities for several forms of untraceable money-laundering, now commonly in use by organised crime to disguise the origins of illicit or illegal proceeds

3) Clauses specifically relating to what is called 'remote gambling' (e.g., that offered by some interactive TV services) but which have led to a massive proliferation of 'online casinos' (offering a wide variety of games) and game-specific websites (online poker being the predominant variety). This sector alone is worth £2bn a year, and is predicted to expand in profitability by 34 per cent by the end of this decade. But it pays a disproportionately-low amount of tax in the UK, due to a lack of foresight in the Gambling Act, which means that such operations tend to leave the UK and carry out their online interactions with UK gamblers entirely legally, while based outside the reach of UK law in other countries with more favourable taxation regimes

The Gambling Act also permitted (for the first time) TV and radio advertising by gambling organisations, an opportunity which was seized with unexpected enthusiasm in the sector's search for increased custom, and has resulted in public penetration nearing inescapable levels, particularly to viewers of commercial television.

In the six years following the introduction of the Gambling Act, the number of officially-recognised gambling addicts doubled ('gambling addiction' being characterised by average gambling-related debts greater than £17,000 and defined by the Royal College of Psychiatrists as: "Gambling that disrupts or damages personal, family or recreational pursuits"), 900,000 further gamblers are officially regarded as being at 'moderate risk' of developing a gambling problem, and a further 2,000,000 are recognised as demonstrating 'some risk factors' -- and an estimated 20 per cent of these are younger than 18 and are thus gambling illegally.

The Licencing Act (2003) was explicitly intended to address problem drinking and its negative social outcomes by introducing a social climate in which European-style levels of social drinking would become the norm, sometimes optimistically referred to as 'a UK café culture'. Paradoxically, the Government proposed to achieve this by relaxing the legal trading hours for licensed premises to a degree that they could apply for permission to sell alcohol 24 hours a day.

This, it was anticipated, would bring an end to a perceived culture which was marked by a tendency to 'drink against the clock' (i.e., to consume as much alcohol as possible before the establishment closed, a form of what is known as 'binge drinking'), which often resulted in crowds of drunk people with nowhere else to go, spilling on to town centre streets from all directions at the same time of night, often resulting in aggressive drink-fuelled behaviour (typically among younger drinkers), other crimes (such as vandalism) and anti-social behaviour in general.

However, while it has slightly lessened the incidence of location-concentrated drunken night-time behaviour, it has actually resulted in alcohol-related crime and disorder becoming more unpredictable, due to being less-firmly associated with specific locations and more common during the day at apparently random times.

Nor, in the decade since the Act's introduction, has alcohol abuse appeared to fall, with the average Briton consuming just over nine litres of pure alcohol a year.

Drink-related deaths have increased by a third since the mid-1980s.
Excessive drinking is now implicated in 33,000 deaths a year
Alcohol misuse costs the NHS up to £3bn a year
More than 28,000 hospital admissions each year are caused by alcohol dependence or poisoning.

Meanwhile, the 'UK Café Culture' has still yet to appear.

And as for the British tendency toward violence, don't get me started ...