Smoking in Europe Is No Longer Cool

[onehandle]

Once upon a time in the Good Old Days, "Europe" was a sophisticated land across the sea full of jazz musicians and sexually adventurous women, and all of them were smoking cigarettes sexily like there was no tomorrow. Those days are dead now. Europe is on its way to becoming just another sanitized smokeless place that sells chocolates.

Yesterday, the "European Parliament," which sounds, ironically, like a brand of cigarettes, but I'll take the WSJ's word that it's actually some sort of lawmaking body, voted to ban "menthol and other flavored cigarettes" throughout the entire European Union. A place that is full of hash! They're also planning to ban "slim" cigarettes, because the packaging is "designed by cigarette makers to look like lipstick or perfume in an effort to appeal to younger women."

Ladies: play it safe and don't smoke your lipstick or perfume, whether or not you believe it to contain cigarettes.

The EU is also going to cover the vast majority of cigarette packaging with strident warnings, and require e-cigarettes to be "to be regulated like medicines." All of this is objectively good public health policy that will likely save many thousands of lives. But it's not cool. The whole "die young and leave a pretty corpse" thing gets harder for each successive generation.

http://gawker.com/smoking-in-europe-is-no-longer-cool-743148572

[Zorra]

1. K&R

[Aristus]

2. 'Cool' can go fuck itself.

I love Europe, but I got sick of all the cigarette smoke everywhere. And while I will swear to the sexy sophistication of European women in a court of law, all that sexiness is undone by sticking a tube of dried brown leaves into her face and setting it alight.

Better health for everyone. Better breathing air for everyone. This is good.

[dorkzilla]

3. I'm SO happy this is happening...

When I was a child spending summer in Ireland, we used to go off to the pub after Mass on Sunday for our Sunday roast. It made me SICK nearly every time, mostly because my clothes REEKED and my Auntie washed our clothes the minute we got home. I'll admit that I became a smoker at about 16 and smoked for 15 years, but since Ireland and England have banned smoking in public houses its been glorious, and since then all my cousins over there have quit smoking.

So something the EU could do to make this really work is to ban smoking in restaurants and cafes. Maybe they did already, but when I was in Italy and France they were still puffing away...

[Dreamer Tatum]

4. Why is the tone of the article so sneering?

Jesus Christ, Gawker, if you want the Europe of your high school jerkoff fantasies, open a theme park.

[former9thward]

5. There is no ban.

The EU Parliament has no authority to impose bans. That is up to member nations. News should come from something more credible than the "gawker". This was not even the EU Parliament anyway -- it was a committee.

[pipi_k]

6. After smoking for

a number of years myself, and quitting in 1996, I often wonder why I bothered with personal hygiene.

I mean, really. Who could smell BO underneath the stench of cigarette smoke anyway?

My daughter makes me laugh. She's a smoker. She can never go anywhere without showering and washing her hair and using cologne or perfume. I ask her why bother...Five minutes out of the shower she's got a cigarette and her cologne has turned to "Eau de Stink".

Anyway...with regards to the OP...when I was a teenager, smoking made us look "cool".

Now I'm 60 and whenever I see someone light up, I think, OMG...lame!!! Like someone else said, sticking a smouldering tube of leaves in one's mouth and inhaling poison into the lungs.

Yeah! Cool!