How recently were you in Vegas? I was blown away by how little smoking there was post pandemic even compared to 2018. Like, most casinos no longer reek of cigarette smoke. I'm sure that's partly explained by better air circulation installed to reopen sooner post-COVID, and probably taking the closures as an opportunity to replace some seriously steeped carpet, but the amount of smoking was way, way down. It used to be if you saddled up to craps table, at least one, if not two people would be actively smoking. Now you can look around the entire pit and not even see one. The combination of anti-smoking measures in broader society, and the uptake of vaping has wildly reduced the amount of smokers. We're talking a 60% reduction since 2000, and that was after the trend was already heading that direction.

Compare that to most places internationally, and the contrast is stark. The US has less than half the cigarette consumption per capita than the EU, with only the U.K., Norway, and Sweden having lower rates. China has a similar rate to the EU.

Just to drive that point home a little harder, the state with the highest number of smokers is West Virginia, sitting at 21% (the national average is 9.6%). That would be middle of the pack in Europe, similar to Italy.

Rare in the northeast US. In fact, I saw two students smoking on a college campus just last week and did a double take. I had not seen a single student smoking in at least a decade. Then I laughed remembering how when I was in college in the 90s, almost everybody smoked at least a little (often at parties), and seeing students smoking at the entrance to the dorm was pretty normal. I am an asthmatic so I've never smoked, and I remember my friends being stunned by this one night when we were out at a bar. Things have changed a lot around here.

Rare as in you can absolutely spot a person smoking sometimes, but there is not the perception that everyone is smoking, the air does not always smell like cigarettes on the streets and even inside businesses, and the ground is not covered in cigarette butts everywhere.

NYC vs Hamburg, Amsterdam, or Brussels are night-and-day differences on this point.

I'm not sure Vegas is representative of much of anything, but last time I was there what I smelled was weed, not tobacco.

I think this is a case of rare being relative to the past.

In the 90s and earlier it was hard to be in a city and not be breathing cigarette smoke pretty much constantly. Offices had ashtrays in the elevator waiting areas for people who couldn't wait to get to their office, restaurants had half the seating reserved for smokers, there were ashtrays in the armrest of every single seat on an airplane.

Its kind of crazy how much norms have changed around smoking in public. It's not "rare" to see a smoker, its that it is much rarer than it was in the past.

Idk if it would call it rare because yeah going on a walk in a downtown area you will definitely see at least a couple people smoking. But 30 years ago it seemed like every other person you passed on the sidewalk was smoking.

I remember walking into buildings in the 1960s and they all stank of stale cigarettes. Not at all today.

The massive shift away from cigarettes is incredible. I didn't believed it possible.

DC suburbs here, I can’t remember the last time I saw someone smoking.