rant · moment 12 of 28
When New York Banned Smoking (and Texas Banned It First)
from #270 - Havana Syndrome | The Tim Dillon Show · #270
3 min
A tangent about smoking sections in restaurants growing up, discovering New York only banned indoor smoking in 2002 while Texas did it back in 1975, and a dark joke about Texas allowing smoking while pregnant but not abortion.
- Tim recalls when smoking bans first appeared, enforced halfheartedly by people who wanted to smoke themselves.
- Restaurants had smoking sections when he was in high school, which seems unimaginable now.
- Cigarette smoke used to pervade everything—airports, planes, streets—but has largely disappeared from daily life.
- New York banned smoking in 2002, but Texas beat them by 27 years with a 1975 indoor smoking restriction.
- Texas in 1975 telling people "do not light up inside" contradicts the stereotype of Texas as libertarian and New York as restrictive.
- Cowboys smoked Marlboros—known as "cowboy killers"—so heavily in Texas that there may have been more deaths back then.
- Tim jokes that Texas currently allows pregnant women to smoke but only if they carry the baby to term, not if they abort.