You wanted to know why?

Italy, Austria, and Czechia. (In the former two it was pretty bad, but in the latter it's entirely inescapable.)

My problem isn't with the fact that people smoke. After all, everyone has the right to do whatever they wish to their own body. It isn't also with the amount of people who smoke. I understand that it's a minority, although a large one. The real problem for me is that they smoke in public places and that the smoke carries to unwilling participants such as myself.

Walking down the street, the majority of people don't smoke, but those who do - stink up the entire area. Same for a restaurant. It takes only one smoker in a room to make me want to vomit. I wish they drank or injected heroin instead - that way they'd be harming only themselves and not me.

And no, I'm not exaggerating, I have seen people with kids smoking more times than I could count. I've also seen pregnant women smoking on at least two occasions, one in Italy and one in Austria. None of them looked poor or downtrodden, just normal average people ... who rudely poison everything around them.

On a completely unrelated note, I noticed there is a strong discrepancy between what is considered a 5-star hotel in the US and in Europe. My agent booked all of my hotels at my request and they were supposed to be top of the line. In reality they are nice, sort of the same as your average 3-star Best Western - clean, functional, but nothing special. Some of them are located in beautiful buildings, but that's about it. Oh and the first class train from Rome to Vienna was really uncomfortable, small and not very clean. I though it'd be an interesting experience, and it was, just not in the way I imagined. From Vienna to Prague I just flew instead.

The food is really good, though.

I can relate to that. The US has a culture of shaming smokers particularly for the effects of second hand smoke (which, as Telika has remarked, actually pressures into compliance and means a loss of individual freedom). Speaking for parts of Germany and not the entirety of Europe, that shaming hardly exists over here even though it may be a bitter necessity.

I often see women (and men!) smoking when their young kids are around as well, and I'm shocked out of my wits when I see pregnant women smoking on the streets. My aunt couldn't stop during pregnancy, and both of her children have certain afflictions that maybe, maybe not, better not think about it too hard, could be related to her having smoked during pregnancy.

Every morning I stand at a train station that has a designated smoking area and signs everywhere that these smoking areas are to be used. Just about 20% of smokers at that station actually do that. The rest doesn't give a shit. The kiddie smokers don't even hide that they're smoking. One guy from the fucking train staff smokes outside of the designated smoking area. And the vapers think they're exempt anyway, never mind that they're exhaling clouds of strawberry stinky steam so thick they could knock you over. They all don't care in whose face they smoke. When someone lights up a cigarette there, I've learnt to expertly check wind direction to quickly hop to a relatively more safe place. And all of those who smoke outside the yellow line, literally all of them, throw their cigarette on the ground when the train arrives, and don't even bother putting their foot on it (and it's "literally all of them" because the only garbage can that lets them properly put out and dispose of their cigarette naturally is... drumroll... in the designated smoking area).

Really, if there's one kind of oppression I'd love to import from you guys...

Ugh. I'm sorry you have to deal with this on daily basis.

This has to be the most stupid comparison I think I've heard in a while.

It'd be interesting to see what percentage of the population dies from firearm-related crimes vs. smoke-related illnesses.

I don't experience this at all. But hey, I'm not in Europe, so...

As a megalomaniac teenager, I was ferociously anti-tobacco, and was considering that smoking was a certain sign of moral defect, just as enjoying music that I didn't, watching too dumb and too fashionable movies, and, generally speaking, following all the trends that teenagers love to share. It was a time where passive smoking was hardly seen as an issue yet. So I was a bit alone with my contempt for smokers and my anger towards imposed smoke clouds.

And rather fast, society caught up, did a 180° turn, and became as intolerant as I used to be, just as I started mellowing towards diversity, humans, and qualities or forms of fun that weren't mine. Nowadays, almost all my friends smoke. And I'm shocked by how they are pushed around by the very self-righteousness that I used to encourage. I still understand being annoyed by having to spend a lot of time in a crammed smoked room. But the way people act nowadays whenever they spot a puft of smoke 500 meters away, or have to endure 4 seconds of olfactive discomfort in the street, pisses me off. It pisses me off because it's often an excuse to act all haughty and exert second-hand authority over others (and boy do swiss people love doing that). And it pisses me off because it demonizes lovely people (no, I don't "expertly check the wind direction", because all the smokers I know do it for me, get up and switch places when the wind turns towards me, even if I would not have collapsed from getting a diluted bit of their smoke for the duration of a coffee).

So yeah, smoking is a mistake, it costs in terms of health and money (some very poor, struggling, friends of mine waste a sorry amount of cash in what they consider as a precious few small pleasures in life), and each time a friend light a cigarette I have a stingy thought about the seconds or minutes of life expectancy they are burning in front of me. But damn. They're being treated like an impure caste, shoved around like middle age lepers, with a manifest joy at legitimately stigmatising others, and acting like pricks in self-defense (cue to smug forum posts from the Land of The Fat). Never, ever, give that sort of legitimacy to people, they'll appropriate and exploit it with the eagerness of a frustrated teenager.

And let's not start on cigarette censorship in medias. Lucas's "enhanced" star wars are a joke compared to the editing out of cigarettes in movies, in posters, and in comics. Yeah, a fine line between valid public health programs and self-indulging moral panics complete with artistic revisionism. Cigarettes are on a slower decline in Europe than in the USA ? Well, maybe the costs in terms of social attitudes would explain this. And, in the meantime, the tobacco industry is still booming, especially in the USA. But hey, freedom of enterprise. Let's sigmatize the consumers and keep glorifying the producers, after all they provide jobs don't they.

TL;DR : Meh. And yes, I'm never happy.

It'd be interesting if you took seven seconds to Google that.
Firearms: 36,252
Smoking: over 480,000*

*"For every person who dies because of smoking, at least 30 people live with a serious smoking-related illness."

Source: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htm
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_facts/index.htm

I think we are talking about different things. Nobody is saying that smoking should be outlawed and smokers punished. If this is what they want to do then by all means, let them. It only becomes a problem when others are affected. To you it's a "puff of smoke from 500 meters and a momentary discomfort" and that's great. You aren't bothered by it, good for you. To others, however, it is not a minor momentary discomfort but rather a severe and prolonged one. This is without even bringing up the health implications.

Someone brought up guns earlier. In and of themselves they are fine, but harming others with them isn't. Same goes for smoking. Surely you can agree that causing others to inhale toxic smoke is bad. When someone uses their toys (guns, cars, drones, rocks, etc.) to cause harm to others we call them a criminal and punish them. This doesn't mean there is any sort of intolerance or a systematic persecution of drone enthusiasts and rock collectors. It's just when they cause harm. Same should apply to smokers. Please, by all means, smoke as much as your heart desires, but if you inflict this on others, then yes, you should be punished.

The problem is very exactly when one situation is treated as the other. And where you draw the line. For ages, we've seen "severe and prolonged discomforts" treated like "minor momentary ones" (it was the years of denial about passive smoking, during which the complains of, say, workers spending their days in suffocated bars were just shrugged away). nowadays, we have lots of "minor momentary ones" treated like "severe and prolonged ones", where super (legally, socially, culturally) entitled people start screaming with a trembling finger pointed at an isolated cigarette that they unfortunately sensed meters away, as if they had just been assulted or as if they just caught cancer. Rationalising their intolerance, hygienism and self-valorizing otherism through the genuine, now recognised, issue of passive smoking.

Generally speaking -and it's a question that goes way beyond smoking- when people feel legitimized in their intolerance (typically by a directive or a sign), they jump on the opportunity to unleash against something that they would have easily tolerated if they had to, or if the context made them too shy to extend their comfort exigence that far. This is very noticeable when it comes to noise (the unrelated criterions that mae people accept it or denounce it), or to nearby children behaviour (yours or other people's), etc. In practice, the actual level of discomfort, tolerability, or even health threat, is very secondary to the question of feeling "enabled" to complain. And social, historical contexts determine this "enabling" aspect. It ends up with these people acting unfairly egoistically instead of those people acting unfairly egoistically.

Law and scientific awareness is just the squeleton. Everyday petty subjectivities are the meat of relationships, they make the real attitudes and outcomes. And these always end up terrible, because we are.

I know you know, and you know I know, but just to be safe, let's make it absolutely clear: It's not a moral defect. Smoking is addictive as fuck and rivals some hardcore drugs in that respect. I'm very aware that pointing the finger at that pregnant woman in the streets who breathes deep is of no use at all. If she were able to stop, she certainly would! But I can, absolutely, ask for some acts of respect and responsibility. And from what I described up there, I mean, is it really too much to ask that smokers use the areas that have been created for smokers? Is it too much to ask that they don't litter? Too much to ask they don't leave their cigarettes smoking when they've been long gone? You can of course assume just about any etiquette stance when you're a smoker, but this specifically is an aggressive, pretentious and reckless breed of smoker, one that I hope and assume none of your friends belongs to.

I usually don't even say a thing, though my looks could probably kill. My best friend has TEH asthma. You bet she does say things. And she's learnt the hard way that she has to be very confrontational if she needs things changed in any given environment.

PS: If I stood 500m away, that would in fact be the other end of the village. Uncomfortable distance begins at 3 meters depending on wind conditions. The expert windchecking moment was with a visibly drunk and not too easy on the nose person who lit a cigarette at just under 2m of distance. ;)

Well, at that age I was pissed by the conformist aspect of smoking. Other teens getting this dumb habit in order to "look cool", or under peer pressure. It was linked to my allergy of fashions and mobs. My impression that nobody judged anything through other factors than "do the other cool kids like it or not". So I saw smoking as a lack of personality. Upstream from metabolical addiction.

Anyway. "Smokers" means -evoke- something different depending on the specimens we've met. You feel you have to ask for respect and responsability. In my experience, respect and responsability didn't even require asking. Maybe I'm just lucky with the people I stumble upon.

It seems that you are willing to dismiss every complaint against smoking as "rationalising ... intolerance, hygienism and self-valorizing otherism." There is no need to do this, even if you are trying to make up for your own self-admitted intolerance as a teenager. Nobody is talking about conspiring to go out of their way to seek out a lone, remote smoker to abuse.

That said, walking on a busy street and smoking is in fact obnoxious. Sitting in a restaurant and lighting up is equally obnoxious. In both situations a smoker is surrounded by dozens of other people in close proximity, who are forced to breathe in the smoke. Surely you see these as legitimate complaints.

I'mm all for personal freedom. People should be free to able to believe in any god, eat any food, take any drugs, sleep with whomever, own guns and tanks and grenades, etc. Just, please, don't sacrifice me to your god, don't eat me, don't force me to take your drugs, don't rape me, don't shoot me with your gun, and don't run me over with your tank. I think it's a reasonable request.

Nope. Re-read. My point is that there are situations where the complaints are objectively legitimate and others where they are not. But that this distinction is blurred by entitlements (which themselves depends on cultural moments).

While I consider it normal to not accept cigarettes in a restaurant, I've also seen isolated smokers, in open air, treated like a crowd of smokers in a basement. I am not in favor of regulations forcing smokers to smoke inside, because someone might accidentally smell them outside. The question, again, is where the line is drawn. And the trend is to draw it more and more oppressively, beyond what would be objectively justified (in terms of accepting discomfort, or in terms of protecting one's health).

It's less annoying than the opposite (tolerating dangerous concentrations of smoke everywhere, especially inside), but it's still annoying too, and not seeing how is just a very one-sided perspective. It's like "oh they're smokers anyway, who cares, they're medically wrong, so, open season". With ultimately, "drawing a line, why? let's forbid it everywhere I could notice it", which is a pretty commonplace (implicit or explicit) stance.