18 is good. In my previous neighbourhood I lived next to a school. A bunch of 14 year olds with smoke under the supervision of their teachers just outside the gates during recess.
There's no culture of smoking suppression in Germany. You'll see behaviours treated as normal that would trigger an emergency meeting elsewhere.
It's pretty easy. Smoking never really stopped in Germany. Vending machines are everywhere. They require age verification, which is not hard to bypass.
We got rid of indoor smoking, but we still accept that people smoke.
its pretty common to have school kids 15+ start smoking. and it's easy for them. cigarettes are presented in vending machines everywhere or sold by unbothered vendors.
Single use vapes seem to be everywhere these days here in Germany. Plus they have been advertised by influencers at the beginning of the pandemic, directly to underage children. Glad they forbid that at the beginning of 2021.
I have one. Don't marry a smoker if you aren't one. They might quit for a while but will resent you for it. It was easier just to let her start again, and rig up some exhaust fans and smart switches to protect myself.
Personally I wonder if switching from the term 'smoker' to something more accurately describing the experience for people around them, maybe something like 'stinker' and 'horrible stinker' instead of 'heavy smoker' might help reduce the appeal.
The exact opposite has happened, because "smoking" was a bad term, now it is "vaping" and that sounds cool, doesn't it. That's also the way smoking made a comeback with young people, vaping and tabak tabacco with sweet tastes and nice scent and shisha bars.
Think about it, smoking is as green as it gets. Think of how much waste every human makes every year and how many animals have to die just to sustain the average human for a year. Think of how much plastic waste the average human makes. If every human lived 20 fewer years, that's mountains of garbage and billions of creatures saved from extinction.
This is just anectodal evidence, but I feel like more people have started to smoke again during the last ~10 years or so.
A few years ago, aggressive marketing rules were introduced here in Germany which resulted in very disgusting pictures on cigarette boxes displaying the consequences of lung cancer etc.
The thing is, when those rules were introduced, cigarette boxes were still prominently displayed everywhere. You just had them lying around en masse at the counter or checkout in any shop, so even as a non-smoker you always had to see the consequences of destroying your own body when you inhale toxic substances. And during that time, I was rarely seeing people smoking at all. It just got really, really uncool to do it.
Nowadays you don't really see those boxes anymore. You have to ask the lady at the counter for them or you go to one of those neutral-looking vending machines we have on the streets. I'm not sure if this is what causes people to start smoking again, maybe it's also the rise of vaping influencers.
I believe there was a study done 1 or 2 years ago that came to the conclusion that especially younger people have started smoking again. I wonder why? Is it just that typical phase of being different than the older generation?
I would love if people would just go back and stop smoking again. Especially those arseholes that are smoking while waiting at a red light. These people deserve a special kind of hell. The second group is smokers selling stuff on eBay and omitting that detail in the description.
Hardly. It may be less expensive than in other countries, but smoking is expensive in Germany. Hence smoking it going up is a sign that the effects of inflation and stagnating growth are limited. Not every problem is related to current economics.
The main reason for the recent development (and that was seen everywhere, not just in Germany) was the pandemic. Social isolation and drug use are connected.
Dim long-term prospects (climate change etc) might play a role, but I'd go with what the article says: Other countries implement a variety of measures to reduce smoking. Germany doesn't. Hence it doesn't go down. I mean, the stuff is addictive and profitable? Who in their right mind would assume it will go away if there's no government action?
As a German living in Australia I can ensure you, smoking is still just as prevalent, it's just people here being addicted to vapes instead of traditional cigarettes.
Disposable vapes are also dangerously cheap (2000 puff vapes are equivalent to about 10 packs of cigarettes, while only costing about $20) and despite efforts to ban them, easily available at any TSG/Ezymart without age verification.
As a German living in Australia I can ensure you, smoking is still just as prevalent, it’s just people here being addicted to vapes instead of traditional cigarettes.
Sure, but those are almost certainly less harmful. Obviously still bad, but a step towards a lesser evil is a step in the right direction.
Probably just an American. It's not cool to smoke here any more it's cool to rip a fat vape. The amount of smokers has gone down but the amount of nicotine users is probably relatively unchanged.
I mean it's only going extinct because people are vaping instead, which is definitely healthier than smoking cigarettes but the nicotine addicts are still out there.
The judgement on vaping is still out. It's not been around for long enough to know what health effects it'll have in the long-term, but since you're still inhaling things your lungs just aren't made to inhale I expect that it will have a negative impact on health.