If you’re playing table games in Reno and Las Vegas, you can still get comp’ed a pack of smokes, even if your average wager is just $5. I get free cigarettes all the time… just ask the pit boss.
I remember smoking culture from my toddlerhood in the late 60’s in the deep south. Everyone smoked. Everyone except those of such ill health that one cigarette would kill 'em.
Ashtrays were the standard coffee table centerpiece, and end table, and bedside table, and just about every damn table. My mom had to open the house up regularly and let it air out, even on cold days.
My mom would send me down to the store with a dollar and it would be enough for her pack of cigarettes, and cokes for both of us. And the clerks had no problems selling a pack of smokes to a 6 year old boy.
(These days, it would be regarded as akin to child abuse to send your 6 year old son to the store alone, much less for a pack of cigarettes.)
I don’t remember hearing about any classes for smoking, but I do remember stealing my mom’s cigarettes and sneaking out to smoke with my freinds, where we practiced smoke rings, french inhales, holding the smouldering butts, etc.
In junior high school, the “bad kids” would hang out across the street from the school, in the woods next to the 7-eleven, where a pack of smokes cost 75 cents. We smoked many different things there… until some idiot burned the place up.
I went to schools all up and down the east coast. In some, smoking was strictly prohibited, but in others, especially in North Carolina, students had a designated smoking area. In Denver, the high school I attended was an open campus on one of the seediest streets in town (E. Colfax - just down the street was Miss Kitty’s strip joint). Students could come and go as they pleased.
But in Seminole, FL, smoking was strictly verboten and punishable by detention or even suspension. I got busted several times, and it was especially galling after coming from a school where it was allowed. Florida sucked all around, so this was no suprise.
I recall vowing never to fly again after they banned smoking on domestic flights. I also recall smoking things other than tobacco on domestic flights…