Your smoking can harm others

Smoking can cause officious idiots to whine hysterically and make bizarre accusations wholly unfounded in fact. Yes children, there is not a single shred of hard evidence which indicates that you will start writhing in agony and die immediately if you stand next to a smoker at a bus stop.

The problem is that in the USA, smokers are in conflict with one aspect of the popular morality in these sad times. The Gods of America are health, beauty, money, and power. That which is believed to be unhealthy is considered immoral -- and that which is believed to be immoral is declared unhealthy by fiat. "You can't have one without the other", so to speak.

For example, people associate the concepts of guilt and sin with eating food that tastes good (and with damn little else, by the way). This could be because they believe that tasty food must necessarily be unhealthy, but it looks to me like it has more to do with the idea that anything worthwhile is immoral. There is a powerful Calvinist streak in American society. In American usage, "unhealthy" is more often than not a dysphemism for "fun". Be it known that the French, who are not utterly ruled by this irrational gibberish (though God knows they're ruled by other irrational gibberish), eat more fat than americans, smoke more cigarettes (not excluding those evil Gauloises things, though some of them have the sense to smoke Drum like civilized people) -- and they have a lower rate of heart disease. Hmmm. Whaddya think that means? I'll tell you what it means: It means that most Americans live their lives in the grip of bizarre superstitions which they like to call "scientific fact".

This cretinous whimpering about "second-hand smoke" is just a crude attempt to trump up a fake utilitarian justification for the murky fears and blind hatreds of a pre-rational nation of illiterate witch-burning peasants.

Then you get asthmatics and allergic people. Well, polite smokers do ask if anybody minds before they light up. The asthmatics have a problem with rude people, not with smokers. If they believe that all smokers are necessarily rude, that's based on their belief that smokers are evil, because smokers (naturally) smoke. Evil people are rude by definition, right? Either that, or, since smokers are evil, it's okay to make any random assumption about them that pops into one's head. There's also the fact that four out of five people who claim to be "allergic to smoke" are probably lying. My solution is simply to be polite to polite people, and give the rude ones the finger. I don't mind humoring imaginary "allergies" if the sufferer has good manners, and if somebody with real allergies behaves like a swine, it serves him right. The problem here is more than the simple fact that they're rude: It's the fact that they consider me a second-class citizen, obligated to obey their commands. I won't tolerate that, especially since 99.999% of these people are my moral, intellectual, and social inferiors. Noblesse oblige has its limits. Limit number one is the point where the peasants start thinking they're in charge.

And who could forget anecdotal evidence, that old favorite of people on a Mission to reform the world. Everybody who relies on anecdotal evidence leaves the statistics "as an exercise for the reader". When the "statistics" are a figment of religious dogma, that's only common sense. Smoking is not the only cause of lung cancer. The superstitious belief that it is, is part of what's so depressing about the whole deal.

(BTW I'm saddened that Tiefling managed to read a whole rant about American society without noticing that I was talking about American society, not the American government. Personally, I think that's just part of the whole mindset, but I won't try to "prove" anything using anecdotes about Tiefling as "evidence". As for "the rest of the world", so what? Nobody lives there anyway.)

What if you already have a health problem like asthma which may or may not be caused by pollution or second-hand smoking?

Then you need clean air dammit or the resulting lung irritation can screw up your entire week breathing-wise (the asthma attack itself is only part of the fun; you get to try to suppress the symptoms over the next couple of days with various medicine knowing that you're only suppressing the symptoms.
Of course, if you don't spend an hour in a room full of smokers but only near a guy smoking a single cigarette, then maybe the only effect you'll feel is that of your lungs cramping up depending on the severity of your asthma.

That is NOT a pleasant feeling, and so I would like people to ASK if it's okay to light a smoke before they do so - in Denmark 10% of the population has asthma to some degree and I think it's safe to assume that it's about the same for the rest of the industrialized world.

This means that if one in ten asks you to please open the damn window it may not be just because they're hysterical health freaks but are planning on doing some breathing later in the day too.

Think about it.

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I can only attribute wharfingers writeup to ignorance because it's not anything near witty enough to be called sarcasm - in short, write me down as offended :P

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Secondhand smoke poses a grave threat to bystanders.

The evidence concerning the health effects of secondhand smoke is not nearly as conclusive as the evidence concerning the health effects of smoking. The research suggests that people who live with smokers for decades may face a slightly higher risk of lung cancer. According to one estimate, a nonsmoking woman who lives with a smoker faces an additional lung cancer risk of 6.5 in 10,000, which would raise her lifetime risk from about 0.34 percent to about 0.41 percent. Studies of secondhand smoke and heart disease, including the results from the Harvard Nurses Study published in 1997, report more-dramatic increases in disease rates--so dramatic, in fact, that they are biologically implausible, suggesting risks comparable to those faced by smokers, despite the much lower doses involved. In any case, there is no evidence that casual exposure to secondhand smoke has any impact on your life expectancy.

If secondhand smoke really is dangerous, smoking ought to be banned everywhere, except in private residences.

Since almost all of the epidemiological evidence about the health effects of secondhand smoke relates to long-term exposure in the home, the fact that this is the one place exempted from current and proposed smoking bans suggests a residual concern for property rights. Yet business owners have property rights, too. If the government respected their right to establish rules about smoking on their own property, potential employees and customers could take such policies into account when deciding where to work or which businesses to patronize. Whether secondhand smoke is a health hazard or merely a nuisance, such a voluntary system is the most appropriate way to deal with the conflicting demands of smokers and nonsmokers, since it allows for diversity and competition, rather than simply imposing the will of the majority on everyone.

Secondhand smoke, or environmental tobacco smoke (ETS), contains numerous human carcinogens for which there is no safe level of exposure. Scientific consensus groups have repeatedly reviewed the data on ETS. These include the US Environmental Protection Agency, California Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Institute of Environmental Sciences' National Toxicology Program. Public policies to protect people from secondhand smoke are based on the following detrimental effects of ETS.

*Each year, about 3,000 nonsmoking adults die from lung cancer as a result of breathing secondhand smoke.
*ETS causes an estimated 35,000 to 40,000 deaths from heart disease in people who are not current smokers.
*ETS causes coughing, phlegm, chest discomfort, and reduced lung function in nonsmokers.
*Each year, exposure to secondhand smoke causes 150,000 to 300,000 lower respiratory tract infections (such as pneumonia and bronchitis) in US children younger than 18 months of age. These infections result in 7,500 to 15,000 hospitalizations every year.
*Secondhand smoke increases the number of asthma attacks and the severity of asthma in about 200,000 to 1 million asthmatic children.
*Secondhand smoke contains over 4,000 substances, more than 40 of which are known or suspected to cause cancer in humans and animals and many of which are strong irritants.

This may be shouted down as anecdotal evidence, but it is undeniably the case that people who work in environments saturated with cigarette smoke have a much higher instance of health and respiratory ailments than those who do not work in such places.

Bartenders in New York City are at very high risk for bronchial ailments. I know of one specific example in which a bartender had to have part of a lung removed due to his exposure to second hand smoke.

This is one of the reasons that Smoke Free Workplace legislation is being discussed by the New York City city council. This is a labor issue; people should not be forced to accept high risk of lung cancer to earn a living (and don't give me any spurious crap about how "they don't have to work there").

It seems to me that those who dismiss the dangers of second hand smoke fall into that category of people who willfully deny that their actions and choices can have detrimental effects on others; the "I'm the only person in the world" syndrome.