Smoking and Tobacco

Boy has this thread evolved or what. On a topic I’m passionate about. My dad was three packs a day and one day quit cold turkey. That’s right, no Nicorette chews, no patches, no crutches of any kind. Damned brave thing to endure to be free of tobacco. Growing up around two heavy smoking parents, with the odor, the dirtiness, observing the sheer obsession the habit induces in those who are addicted to it was enough for put me off ever tempting fate by trying it. Thank goodness for that. Obsessive behaviors can run in families and I’m happy to have dodged the tobacco bullet my entire life.

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Same here. No desire ever. I consider myself very fortunate.

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Man we are keeping @Elk busy with these side topics that need moving to their own thread. Maybe this post will get moved to the new “Elk Appreciation Discussion”?

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Ohhh yeah, I was one of the cool kids. I grew up asthmatic, so I had my inhaler rolled up in my T-shirt sleeve. Drove the girls wild.

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I smoked a pack a day from '78 to '84. The reason I quit was that cigarettes had just gone up to 85 cents a pack and I knew they’d be up to a dollar in no time. There was no way I was going to pay that much for them. :laughing:

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So true. My father and uncle bought the records like they were going out of style. I took to the next level.

Buying tobacco would have cut into the money we saved up for our obsession.

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It is hard sometimes. I watched 8 hours of the Beatles and basically everyone but the children were chain smoking continuously. Tonight I watched “Being the Ricardos” and once again, everyone is smoking. I so want to go buy just one cig. But they don’t allow that.

So I’ll tough it out and listen to music where you can only imagine they have a cig at the top of each guitar as they crank out the jams.

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It’s so funny how generally awful it smells to people after they have quit…that’s speaking from personal experience. The only time I smoked a pack a day was at concerts when I was much younger and “experimenting”. It still sounds pretty good sometimes, and movies (new and old) really make it look awesome.

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I smoked from 18 to 35 and then quit when my now late first wife moved in and she started bumming cigarettes from me. I didn’t want her to start the habit. I was smoking over a pack a day, non-filtered, and I quit cold turkey. Hardest thing for me to do, 1990 was an important year in my life for that reason. For years I would smoke in my dreams–be alarmed, sometimes wake up and say to myself “I thought I have quit–ah it was a dream.” I gave myself permission to smoke in my dreams and that kept me from buying cigarettes I think. It’s been about fifteen years since I had such a dream.

I had to change so much of my life when I quit–drink far less coffee, drink even less alcohol than I did which gradually over the first few years led to none, and stay away from places where people smoked (luckily public non-smoking became the norm soon after that).

I’m not often proud of myself, but I take pride in quitting.

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I just stopped when I bought my first house—baby in the oven. No way I wanted my child to breath that in, for my house to stink from cigarettes. Just stopped. It wasn’t hard for me.

Funny–it used to be that if a guitar or amp didn’t smell from cigarettes, you knew the owner didn’t play out.

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One of my best pals attempted smoking cessation at least five times in 10 years. It was ABSOLUTELY BRUTAL for her but she finally nailed it via a book.

I’ve never consumed tobacco of any type or via any method. However, I can smell if someone is smoking about 300 meters away. Okay, closer to a full kilometer.

I’ve gotten myself into trouble via my big mouth. On a few occasions out running, I’ve blurted out “Who the F is smoking?” and it’s gone poorly at least once.

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Tobacco farm, Vinales Cuba - 2019

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Smoking on the beach or on a hike through the woods. Really?

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I lived briefly in Raleigh, NC in the early 2000’s. While we were there we spent time traveling around the state, mostly searching for BBQ. One of the unexpected things we noticed was the smell of tobacco plants growing and drying. I personally found the aromas very pleasant. I’ve seen some colognes and coffees scent described with term Tobacco. I understand what the scent is, I wonder how many are turned off by that description never having had the opportunity to enjoy the aroma.

I still want smell-o-vision.

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I have scolded smokers in and around my building. Ours is a 100% smoke-free high-rise. I haven’t hesitated a microsecond to report even a whiff of smoke on my floor. More insidious is violation of the minimum 100 foot limit from the entrance of the building rule. I’ve barked at smokers who knowingly violate the rule. And nothing, NOTHING, angers me more than discarded butts flicked into our flower beds. There is a certain mentality involved I can’t countenance. I did say I’m passionate about this subject …

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I never smoked, but played in clubs for so long during the days when you could smoke in them, I feel like I kinda did anyway. Still, when you said “non-filtered” I had a total flashback to recording an album with an engineer who chain-smoked non-filtered cigarettes. God… that control room… it was SOOOOO bad to those of us who didn’t smoke. I can only imagine the negative effects to his equipment too. Still, he was good at what he did and ended up producing some good bands. He has since quit smoking too.

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With this hobby one of the worst things is buying a used piece of gear that smells like it had a 3 pack a day habit.

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My grandfather and uncles were N.C. tobacco farmers until it market forces and government agricultural policies made it less financially attractive. I can vividly remember the wonderful smell of drying and curing tobacco in the curing barns after harvest. Tobacco extract has long been utilized in the perfumer’s art when an earthy, masculine quality is called for in a fragrance. It has chemical compounds that trigger olfactory responses similar to whiskey and caramel.

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One of the regular “how to” posts that pop up frequently in guitar forums is how to remove smoke smell from instruments and cases. Some of the suggestions for the cases are interesting, like sprinkling the inside of the case with ground coffee.

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I tried ground coffee on a pair of cables and it worked. Initially, when I opened the shipping box I was pretty annoyed. But, The Google came to the rescue with the coffee grounds idea. I grind pretty decent coffee that I didn’t want to use for an experiment so I picked up a can of ground coffee and tried it.

The only problem I had with this fix was that while I had those cables installed, every time I went behind my rack I suddenly wanted breakfast.

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