# Smoking in classrooms - how recently did this stop? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [September 26, 2008, 5:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smoking-in-classrooms-how-recently-did-this-stop/465293 "2008-09-26T05:23:12Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![jali](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ecae2f/32.png) [@jali](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jali)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2008, 2:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smoking-in-classrooms-how-recently-did-this-stop/465293/21 "2008-09-26T14:43:49Z")
> [@Ronald\_C.Semone](#): > > This is a slight hijack, but until around 1950 smoking was allowed on the city buses of my home town, Worcester, Mass. There was a big, nasty debate and a lot of hard feelings when smoking was finally banned on the buses. What’s the latest anyone remembers smoking being allowed on buses? I visited my girlfriend in 1975 or 1976 in Columbia, S.C. and it was okay to smoke on busses then. ---
**Author:** ![kiz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/7feea3/32.png) [@kiz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kiz)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2008, 2:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smoking-in-classrooms-how-recently-did-this-stop/465293/22 "2008-09-26T14:55:26Z")
In high school you could smoke on campus as long as you stayed in the designated “butt area”. We had “No Smoking” signs in college. This was in the early 1980s. I don’t remember ever being in a class where anyone smoked. I presumed, though, that people did smoke in class sometime during the 60s and 70s. ---
**Author:** ![Leaffan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leaffan/32/299_2.png) [@Leaffan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leaffan)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2008, 2:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smoking-in-classrooms-how-recently-did-this-stop/465293/23 "2008-09-26T14:57:12Z")
There was an outside smoking area at my high school. I was there from 76 to 80. Cigarettes weren’t the only things being smoked. 😉 Teachers smoked in the teacher’s lounge. No one smoked in classrooms, and washrooms were technically out of bounds too, but that didn’t stop a lot of students from sneaking a puff between class. When I attended college in 1980 it was the first year that smoking was banned from classrooms. The only place you could smoke was the cafeteria. When I started working full time in 1985 you could smoke in your cubicle. A couple of years later a cubicle ban was in place, and once again the cafeteria was the only indoor place you could smoke. Lunches sure were delicious back then! It really is unfathomable now to think that simply lighting up at your desk or anywhere indoors was “the norm.” ---
**Author:** ![Cisco](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ccd318/32.png) [@Cisco](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cisco)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2008, 4:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smoking-in-classrooms-how-recently-did-this-stop/465293/24 "2008-09-26T16:18:59Z")
> [@Kalhoun](#): > > I was born in 56 and we had a smoking area in HS but were not allowed to smoke in class. In case it wasn’t clear, my mom wasn’t allowed to smoke in class either. It just wasnt’ really enforced when it was dark and the teacher “couldn’t see you.” It was like chewing gum: technically against the rules but no one enforces it once you get to high school unless you’re smacking and blowing bubbles in their face. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2008, 6:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smoking-in-classrooms-how-recently-did-this-stop/465293/25 "2008-09-26T18:38:33Z")
> [@Mahna\_Mahna](#): > > My parents graduated in from med school in the mid-70’s. My dad remembers that both students and profs would occasionally smoke during lectures… in fact, he even recalls the prof smoking while delivering a lecture on the potential ill effects of smoking. As they are only human like the rest of us, it took the medical profession years if not decades to stop smoking. My father, now a retired doc, didn’t stop until about 1970, after first trying to reduce the risk by switching to small cigars. Those didn’t work out for him because he couldn’t help inhaling the way one does with cigarettes. I imagine this happened to a lot of people back then. Cigars and cigarettes aren’t smoked in the same way, and it’s hard to switch to the cigar method if you are only used to cigarettes. As an aside, pot is smoked in a way of its own, different from both. You’d think the methodology of all smoking would be the same, but it isn’t. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2008, 6:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smoking-in-classrooms-how-recently-did-this-stop/465293/26 "2008-09-26T18:49:10Z")
> [@Cunctator](#): > > When I was at school (in the 1970s), being caught smoking anywhere on the school grounds was a serious misdemeanour. “at school” = everything before uni? I ask, because in American “at school” can be anything from kindergarten to a Ph.D. course. With regard to schoolteachers smoking, we should remember that schools and school districts were prejudicial against smoking even 100 and more years ago. Many of the teachers were young women hired out of college or normal school, and it was common to require that they be single and of good moral character. Smoking by women was seldom acceptable back then, so it wasn’t a tobacco-friendly environment. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2008, 6:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smoking-in-classrooms-how-recently-did-this-stop/465293/27 "2008-09-26T18:52:04Z")
About my dad the doctor, it’s funny to think that he really started his smoking habit as a medic in Korea; he wasn’t in a M_A_S\*H, but in a more permanent installation. They probably all smoked like chimneys, but in the TV show there’s nary a cigarette to be seen. ---
**Author:** ![Cisco](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ccd318/32.png) [@Cisco](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cisco)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2008, 7:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smoking-in-classrooms-how-recently-did-this-stop/465293/28 "2008-09-26T19:00:28Z")
> [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](#): > > With regard to schoolteachers smoking, we should remember that schools and school districts were prejudicial against smoking even 100 and more years ago. Many of the teachers were young women hired out of college or normal school, and it was common to require that they be single and of good moral character. Smoking by women was seldom acceptable back then, so it wasn’t a tobacco-friendly environment. I clearly remember being in 5th grade and walking past the teacher’s lounge every day on the way to my classroom and getting blasted by a big whiff of smoke. This would’ve been 1991. That must’ve been the last year they allowed that because I knew which teachers smoked and in 6th grade I would always stare out the windows and see them walking back and forth to the woods out behind the school to smoke, and I never smelled anything coming out of the teacher’s lounge anymore. The high school I went to had a smoking area for seniors until about 2 years before I got there (I started h.s. in 1995.) Of course, this was in North Carolina, the state with a ban on smoking bans, so we were probably a little later to catch on than most states. ---
**Author:** ![Harriet\_the\_Spry](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e56c9b/32.png) [@Harriet\_the\_Spry](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Harriet_the_Spry)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2008, 7:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smoking-in-classrooms-how-recently-did-this-stop/465293/29 "2008-09-26T19:45:25Z")
In the mid-'70s in Minneapolis, my mom decided against sending me to a progressive private elementary school because they let the teachers smoke in the classrooms. In the public schools at that time smoking in classrooms would have been completely unheard of, though. ---
**Author:** ![Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e99b99/32.png) [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2008, 7:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smoking-in-classrooms-how-recently-did-this-stop/465293/30 "2008-09-26T19:57:06Z")
I smoked in a college classroom in 1984. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2008, 8:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smoking-in-classrooms-how-recently-did-this-stop/465293/31 "2008-09-26T20:06:37Z")
I was in HS in the early 50s and students were forbidden to smoke anywhere on the rather large (17 acre) school grounds and the teachers only in the teacher’s lounge (which reeked!). But we students all smoked on the south lawn of the school and no one ever said “boo”. In college in the late 50s the students and teachers smoked regularly in classrooms and no one thought anything of it. When I became a lecturer, asst. prof., etc., I smoked freely in the classrooms and so did the students (mid-60s). When I had a heart attack in '65, I stopped and have not smoked since, but the students still smoked. When I moved to my current position (from which I am now retired) in 1968, I think classroom smoking was waning and probably disappeared in the 70s. There are now no-smoking signs in the classrooms. The crusade then turned to private offices. Smoking was banned in them in maybe 1990. So there was a mid-morning and mid-afternoon gathering outside every building door and they eventually put up ashtrays by the doors. Then some years ago, the province of Quebec banned smoking within 9 meters (why 9?) of any public building, which every university building is. But I still see a regular mid-morning and mid-afternoon crowd puffing away, even when it is -25 C (-13 F). One effect this has is that people do not take offense if you ask them not to smoke in your home and even smokers end up smoking a lot less than they would otherwise. Our next-door neighbor walks his dog ten times a day because his wife will not permit him to smoke indoors. She is a breast cancer survivor (more than 30 years ago) and so may have a special reason. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2008, 8:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smoking-in-classrooms-how-recently-did-this-stop/465293/32 "2008-09-26T20:48:12Z")
No Smoking in any HS in my area in the 70’s. Except in the teachers lounge. That is what “Smoking in the Boy’s Room” is about. In College, only in lounges and outside the classroom. ---
**Author:** ![fifty-six](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/5daacb/32.png) [@fifty-six](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fifty-six)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2008, 9:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smoking-in-classrooms-how-recently-did-this-stop/465293/33 "2008-09-26T21:56:41Z")
I grew up in North Texas. My elementary school Principle smoked cigars in the hallways. We use to get in trouble if we make choking sounds. Late 70’s. ---
**Author:** ![vivalostwages](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/d07c76/32.png) [@vivalostwages](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/vivalostwages)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2008, 10:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smoking-in-classrooms-how-recently-did-this-stop/465293/34 "2008-09-26T22:04:05Z")
I went through college and university in the late 80s to early 90s and never conceived of anyone smoking inside a classroom. The newest rule is that one shouldn’t smoke within 20 feet or so of the classrooms, though this is routinely violated. ---
**Author:** ![FallenAngel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/5daacb/32.png) [@FallenAngel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FallenAngel)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2008, 10:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smoking-in-classrooms-how-recently-did-this-stop/465293/35 "2008-09-26T22:13:20Z")
I went to U of Toledo from 87-92. We could smoke in the hallways of all the class buildings until 90 or so, but not in class, that was eliminated in 86. The second newspaper I worked at (1993-94) we could (and did) smoke at our desks. The workplace smoking ban started in Ohio right after I left that job. I remember when I was a kid that my folks smoked in line at the bank and while shopping in department stores. I guess that went on until about 80 or so. ---
**Author:** ![Kyla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/eada6e/32.png) [@Kyla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kyla)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2008, 11:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smoking-in-classrooms-how-recently-did-this-stop/465293/36 "2008-09-26T23:22:48Z")
In Bulgaria, I never heard of a teacher actually smoking IN CLASS, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens. The secretary of our school smokes like a chimney, in her office. Once I was working with the Russian teacher (another smoking fiend) on a project in the school computer lab and he pulled out a cigarette and started lighting up before I pointed out that the school was supposed to be non-smoking. That was last year. There’s a rather new law that there has to be a non-smoking area in restaurants. Most restaurants have followed this law by putting a little no-smoking sign on one table, all surrounded by tables full of people smoking. SO helpful. It’s only really recently that smoking has been banned in busses, and they still allow the drivers to smoke, in Bulgaria and Turkey, too. A woman smoked on the bus from Sarajevo to Skopje, and no one told her to put it out. She was wearing a hijab, too, which made me even crosser - I’m pretty sure cigarettes are un-Islamic. People smoked in the hallways of my university in Israel. That was in 1998/1999. There were signs posted that smoking was forbidden, but they were ignored. ---
**Author:** ![Hyperelastic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/a3d4f5/32.png) [@Hyperelastic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hyperelastic)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2008, 11:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smoking-in-classrooms-how-recently-did-this-stop/465293/37 "2008-09-26T23:22:59Z")
Smoking was not allowed in classrooms in my high school, but there was a courtyard immediately adjacent to half the classrooms, in which seniors were allowed to smoke. This was in 1987. ---
**Author:** ![Cunctator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/43a26b/32.png) [@Cunctator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cunctator)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2008, 4:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smoking-in-classrooms-how-recently-did-this-stop/465293/38 "2008-09-27T04:13:19Z")
> [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](#): > > “at school” = everything before uni? I ask, because in American “at school” can be anything from kindergarten to a Ph.D. course. Yes, I meant high school. “At school” in Australia refers to primary and secondary education only. Once you’re into the optional tertiary stage, it’s no longer “school”. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2008, 7:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smoking-in-classrooms-how-recently-did-this-stop/465293/39 "2008-09-27T07:08:33Z")
> [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](#): > > About my dad the doctor, it’s funny to think that he really started his smoking habit as a medic in Korea; he wasn’t in a M_A_S\*H, but in a more permanent installation. They probably all smoked like chimneys, but in the TV show there’s nary a cigarette to be seen. It’s not nessesary, just like it’s rarely nessesary to show dudes taking a piss. Look at Thank You for Smoking, where the Protagonist is a 4 pack a day man, but is never seen smoking. ---
**Author:** ![El\_DeLuxo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/el_deluxo/32/9043_2.png) [@El\_DeLuxo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/El_DeLuxo)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2008, 3:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smoking-in-classrooms-how-recently-did-this-stop/465293/40 "2008-09-27T15:29:09Z")
At my HS (class of 1977) there was an outdoor smoking area for students, while teachers smoked in their lounge – this was in deepest darkest Central West Virginia, where nearly everyone smoked, chewed, or dipped, and some people did two at one time. This was both more and less restrictive than it had been at the previous high school which was closed in '74 – the new school was a closed campus, while in the old one on-campus smoking wasn’t permitted for the students, but they _were_ allowed to leave the premises between classes and during the noon break to smoke a cigarette, buy lunch at the corner store, get loaded, or whatever. In college (circa '78-81, another section of the same State), it was at the discretion of the instructor; most classrooms/lecture areas were assumed non-smoking, but the head of the Psych Department, for example, was a smoker and you were allowed to smoke in her classes as long as you used an ashtray and did not otherwise create a distraction. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smoking-in-classrooms-how-recently-did-this-stop/465293.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smoking-in-classrooms-how-recently-did-this-stop/465293.md?page=3)