10 Background Star Trek Items More Important Than You Think

It's well-known that smoking and tobacco addiction are largely relics of the past in Star Trek.

We have seen characters light an occasional cigarette, for example, Guinan smoked one while playing through the Dixon Hill period-piece holonovel in the Next Gen episode Clues. There were also characters like Les Buenamigo, Liam Shaw, and Cristóbal Rios who would smoke cigars recreationally, and others who would inhale other alien drugs, but cigarette addiction seems practically unheard of beyond the 21st century. In the Voyager episode Ex Post Facto, Tom Paris saw someone smoking and claimed, 'Smoking is a bad habit. My species gave it up centuries ago when we finally got it into our heads that it was killing us.'

Despite this, you can actually see a 'no smoking' sign on the wall of the simulator bridge in Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan. The sign reads 'NO SMOKING AT ANY TIME ON BRIDGE' and originally also appeared on the Enterprise's bridge before Gene Roddenberry requested to have it removed, saying that smoking would not be a thing in the future he created. However, the simulator bridge kept it, and the sign remained visible in the final cut of the Kobayashi Maru test scene.

Despite Roddenberry's wishes, the fact that this sign was placed in the simulator room implies that smoking was still fairly common in the 23rd century.