{"id":2082,"date":"2014-04-05T19:19:51","date_gmt":"2014-04-05T19:19:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pepesnonsmokingpartytimelounge.com\/?p=2082"},"modified":"2016-02-22T01:15:25","modified_gmt":"2016-02-22T01:15:25","slug":"when-i-became-militant-about-cigarettes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pepesnonsmokingpartytimelounge.com\/?p=2082","title":{"rendered":"When I became militant about cigarettes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"1897682_10152021273021127_2078463374_n\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This image I saw from Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids reminds me of a story. I pinpoint it to the day I became militant about smoking.<\/p>\n

I grew up around smoking. I breathed six packs a day worth of secondhand smoke from my parents (dad — 4 packs a day, mom — 2 packs a day). I remember whining to them about how much their smoking was bothering me in the car, and I was told “just roll down the window.” They didn’t want to hear it. I remember how bad their smoke was in the RV all night when we went camping.<\/p>\n

Well, sure enough, I had a ton of ear infections as a kid. Had to have surgery on my ears because of the ear infections, probably caused by my parents’ smoking. In my early teens I started getting bronchitis all the time. By the time I hit college age, any head cold would immediately migrate to my chest and it would turn into 6 weeks of coughing. Twice in my 20s, I came down with pneumonia (and one time pleurisy). Only at the age of 29 did I finally grow out of that annual cycle of bronchitis and 6-8 weeks every winter of nonstop coughing.<\/p>\n

Anyway, this brings me to\u00a0Vic’s Drive Inn in Friday Harbor, Wash. Vic’s was a smoking joint, and in fact, I never sat down in Vic’s as a result. The smoke was SO thick in that place that one time I walked in just to grab a pickup order and walked back to work and everyone made fun of me because I reeked of smoke. I was in the building for less than 10 minutes. It was so bad, I went home and changed.<\/p>\n

So, this one other time I walked into Vic’s, there was a fisherman sitting at a table (Friday Harbor was once a fishing town — no more, the fishing industry was in its dying throes at the time), puffing away on his cigarette with about a two-year-old boy sitting in his lap, coughing his head off and bawling. It just made me livid. The kid obviously had a respiratory infection, and there’s dad sitting 12 inches away literally blowing cigarette smoke in his face. Boy, I’m a big believer in not giving smokers shit, but I gave that guy a good glaring. What an asshole, I thought. What a self-centered idiot. It just brought back all my memories of those awful trips in the car and awful nights in the RV around a haze of cigarette smoke, and awful nights\u00a0with burning eyes and a burning throat. I literally felt like punching the moron. I was really, really furious. I have never been so angry at a smoker.<\/p>\n

\"vic's\"<\/a>
Vic’s — an icon in Friday Harbor, Washington<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Instead, years later, I decided to blog about tobacco and to try and be a bit more constructive. Like I said, i will never forget that day, or that kid, or how amazingly stupid that guy was being. This would have been sometime in the mid-1990s.<\/p>\n

(As an aside, Vic’s Drive Inn was sold a couple of years after that, and the new owners made it smokefree. I did a big article on it at the time. They said they lost a few customers, but gained a lot more than they lost. Washington went smokefree about 10 years ago and smoking restaurants went away.)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This image I saw from Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids reminds me of a story. I pinpoint it to the day I became militant about smoking. I grew up around smoking. I breathed six packs a day worth of secondhand smoke from my parents (dad — 4 packs a day, mom — 2 packs a … Continue reading When I became militant about cigarettes<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2083,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[265,57,59,60],"tags":[648,266,267],"class_list":["post-2082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-friday-harbor","category-smoking-2","category-smoking-around-kids","category-smoking-bans-2","tag-friday-harbor","tag-smoking-around-kids-2","tag-vics-drive-inn"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/pepesnonsmokingpartytimelounge.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/1897682_10152021273021127_2078463374_n.jpg?fit=395%2C395&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4hpEa-xA","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":450,"url":"https:\/\/pepesnonsmokingpartytimelounge.com\/?p=450","url_meta":{"origin":2082,"position":0},"title":"Kids’ ear infections drop dramatically — partly because of drop in smoking","author":"Pepe Lepew","date":"March 5, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Fascinating story I read yesterday. Health officials report that over the last 15 years, ear infections among children have dropped a whopping 30 percent. Wow! 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In this survey from Australia, it was found that smokers were nearly three times as likely\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Secondhand smoke"","block_context":{"text":"Secondhand smoke","link":"https:\/\/pepesnonsmokingpartytimelounge.com\/?cat=56"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/pepesnonsmokingpartytimelounge.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/smoker.jpg?fit=600%2C416&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/pepesnonsmokingpartytimelounge.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/smoker.jpg?fit=600%2C416&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/pepesnonsmokingpartytimelounge.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/smoker.jpg?fit=600%2C416&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":3617,"url":"https:\/\/pepesnonsmokingpartytimelounge.com\/?p=3617","url_meta":{"origin":2082,"position":5},"title":"Washington Post: U.S. smoking rate drops below 17 percent … and other smoking trends","author":"Pepe Lepew","date":"November 16, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"A very nice article in the Washington Post this week about \"who stills smokes today.\" First of all, the good news. According to the Post article, which got its numbers from the Centers for Disease Control, the smoking rate in the U.S. has dropped to 16.8 percent. That's the lowest\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "centers for disease control"","block_context":{"text":"centers for disease control","link":"https:\/\/pepesnonsmokingpartytimelounge.com\/?cat=13"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/pepesnonsmokingpartytimelounge.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/smoking-rate.jpg?fit=1200%2C805&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/pepesnonsmokingpartytimelounge.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/smoking-rate.jpg?fit=1200%2C805&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/pepesnonsmokingpartytimelounge.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/smoking-rate.jpg?fit=1200%2C805&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/pepesnonsmokingpartytimelounge.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/smoking-rate.jpg?fit=1200%2C805&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/pepesnonsmokingpartytimelounge.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/smoking-rate.jpg?fit=1200%2C805&ssl=1&resize=1050%2C600 3x"},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pepesnonsmokingpartytimelounge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pepesnonsmokingpartytimelounge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pepesnonsmokingpartytimelounge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pepesnonsmokingpartytimelounge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pepesnonsmokingpartytimelounge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2082"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/pepesnonsmokingpartytimelounge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2082\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3748,"href":"https:\/\/pepesnonsmokingpartytimelounge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2082\/revisions\/3748"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pepesnonsmokingpartytimelounge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pepesnonsmokingpartytimelounge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pepesnonsmokingpartytimelounge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pepesnonsmokingpartytimelounge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}