Have you considered that perhaps you just didn't know how bad your physical aversion to smoke was years ago because there wasn't a meaningful alternative to putting up with it in public?

As a kid I grew up in a house with two chain-smoking parents. I was always sick: colds, allergies, asthma, etc. I never made the connection between that and constant exposure to cigarette smoke. In part that's because I never experienced an alternative. Until I went away to college. Within months of being in a largely smoke free environment I realized that I was a completely different person, health-wise, from whom I'd been the first 17 1/2 years of my life.