Surgeon General: No safe level of secondhand smoke
WASHINGTON (AP) — Separate smoking sections don’t cut it: Only smoke-free buildings and public places truly protect nonsmokers from the hazards of breathing in other people’s tobacco smoke, says a long-awaited surgeon general’s report. Some 126 million nonsmokers are exposed to secondhand smoke, what U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona repeatedly calls “involuntary smoking” that puts people at increased risk of death from lung cancer, heart disease and other illnesses.
On many occasions over the past few years, I’ve been at loggerheads with some of my readers over my intolerance of smokers and of secondhand smoke. Many (including Adam, my soon-to-be-a-lawyer stepson) have stated emphatically that there is no actual or implied “right to breathe clean, unpolluted air”. As I’ve said all along, I’m fully aware that my argument is largely emotional, and I’ve never attempted to present it as anything but. Nonetheless, if you are smoking, you have NO RIGHT to deny me the ability the breathe clean, non-tobaccofied air. If you choose to accept the risks to your health that accompany your addiction, that is your choice, not mine. Given that tobacco smoke neither recognizes nor respects boundaries, I believe that my right to breathe air that is unpolluted by cigarette smoke trumps your right to feed your addiction. Period. End of story. Deal with it.
This inflexibility will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me or has hung around TPRS for any length of time, but I can think of nothing I am more intolerant of than cigarette smoking (YOU try spend a few months in Yugoslavia, and see if that doesn’t change your mind). I am generally a pretty laid-back, easygoing sort…until someone lights up a cigarette in my vicinity. I’ve been known to become downright rude when this happens, and while it’s not what I set out to do and it’s not something I’m proud of, I simply cannot and will not tolerate cigarette smoke. If you knew that something would make you physically ill, would you tolerate or consume it, even secondhand? Of course not. Why, then, should I be expected to breathe air contaminated by cigarette smoke when I know it’s going to make me sick? If that makes me an asshole, then it’s a label I will proudly wear. IO SONO UN COGLIONE!!
For those who think I’ve gone overboard on this issue, I would offer this for your consideration:
Moreover, there is no risk-free level of exposure to someone else’s drifting smoke, declares the report issued Tuesday — a conclusion sure to fuel already growing efforts at public smoking bans nationwide.
There, could it be made any clearer, any less ambiguous? THERE. IS. NO. SAFE. LEVEL. OF. EXPOSURE. TO. SECOND-HAND. SMOKE. Period. Any questions?
Of course, this doesn’t even begin to address what smokers are doing to their children, does it? Call me biased, but shouldn’t this be defined as child abuse?
[T]he surgeon general is especially concerned about young children who can’t escape their parents’ addiction in search of cleaner air: Just over one in five children is exposed to secondhand smoke at home, where workplace bans don’t reach. Those children are at increased risk of SIDS, sudden infant death syndrome; lung infections such as pneumonia; ear infections; and more severe asthma. (Full story)
“Exposure to secondhand smoke remains an alarming public health hazard,” Carmona said. “Nonsmokers need protection through the restriction of smoking in public places and workplaces” — and by smokers voluntarily not puffing around children.
If parents were smoking marijuana in the presence of their children, the hue and cry, the weeping and gnashing of teeth, would be heard far and wide. “How dare they do this to their precious, vulnerable children?” So why is this hue and cry not heard when cigarette smoke is substituted for marijuana smoke? Cigarette smoke is a KNOWN carcinogen, and yet NO ONE is screaming because children who live with smokers are essentially a prisoner of their parents’ addiction? WTF?? Has the tobacco lobby’s money really pruchased that much craven hypocrisy??
I can’t tell you how often I was forced to inhale my father’s cigarette smoke as a child. Many was the time I would be riding in the car with him as he smoked, and you just can’t roll down the window in northern Minnesota in the dead of winter. Who knows what my risk of lung cancer is at this point? Who knows what other adverse impacts that second-hand exposure has had on my health? Of course, 30-35 years ago, no one talked about these risks, though tobacco companies knew full-well the risks and dangers posed by the use of their products.
We know better now, and yet government and the tobacco industry have done nothing to protect our children. Angry? You’re damn right that makes me angry. How much has my life been shortened through my years of forced, vicarious re-smoking of my father’s cigarettes? How many others from my own, as well as subsequent generations, will have to suffer, perhaps even die from this exposure before something is done? What of the politicians and tobacco companies with blood on their hands?
If my militancy and my obstinance on this issue angers you, well, I’d apologize, but it would be wholly insincere and pointless. I’m not sorry, and I have no plans to back down. You have NO RIGHT to deny me of my right to breathe clean, untobaccofied air. Period. I hope that’s clear and unambiguous enough for y’all.
