Kitty litter to the rescue!

No, seriously — it works really well at getting rid of smoke odor.

I bought a collection of California Raisin figurines at a yard sale for a decent price. They were a little dirty but they’re durable, so they withstood scrubbing to get the grime off. Then I smelled the cigarettes. The woman who sold them to me smoked like a chimney and pretty much impregnated the Raisins with that stale odor. So much for resale.

I tried following my own advice and immersed them in baking soda. It hardly put a dent in the smell, even after a few weeks. I was reluctant to use vinegar because acids tend to do bad things to plastics. Then my wife, who had gotten some out-of-print ValueTale books (eBay) for nostalgic reasons and needed to knock out some smells from those, put a bunch of the Raisins in kitty litter for a few weeks. That did the trick. The odor is much, much reduced.