The rights and the wrongs of smoking in public
07/02/2009
While living in the San Fernando Valley in early 2006, I remember thinking how ludicrous it was that the Calabasas City Council had adopted an ordinance that basically eliminated the ability for anyone to smoke in public. The secondhand smoke control ordinance specified that smoking was prohibited in all public places where other persons could be exposed to secondhand smoke, including indoor and outdoor businesses, hotels, parks, apartment common areas, restaurants and bars where people could reasonably be expected to congregate or meet.
At the time, as a half-a-pack-a-day smoker, I felt persecuted and loathed. It seemed unfair that a municipality — in essence, the mayor, the mayor pro tem and three City Council members — would use its authority to ban my right to smoke in public. After all, it wasn’t as if I was sitting in a confined, poorly ventilated office blowing smoke down the throats and nasal passages of my colleagues. I was your average Jane Q. Public, biking and swimming regularly and eating healthy foods, who thoroughly enjoyed inhaling the intoxicating smoke of a Camel Light. And I had enjoyed it for almost eight years at the time the ordinance was adopted, with the exception of a two-year break during my pregnancy and my son’s infancy.
After I left the Valley, I moved up north and found myself in a pro-smoking environment. It was widely accepted, if not condoned, as a bridge to meeting new people. But as the butts piled up, I found the habit to be more destructive and bothersome. The initial buzz that everyone gets with the first cigarette wears off as the day progresses. Instead of relaxing and enjoying cigarettes, I was tense and frustrated because my nicotine level wasn’t high enough. And as a friend pointed out, it wasn’t the nicotine that was making me feel relaxed; it was taking deep breaths throughout the day to deliver more oxygen into my body — something that was defeated as my lungs sucked up nasty carcinogens.
By December 2007, I decided I’d had enough. I went on vacation, shredded my last pack of cigarettes and never looked back. Although the withdrawals would still irritate me from time to time for a short while thereafter, the fact I would never again crave cigarettes because of low nicotine levels gave me a sense of freedom that I hadn’t experienced since I was a teenager. It was a great feeling, and still is.
Having said that, although I am not in favor of the government legislating certain behaviors, the problem is that when you are a smoker, you simply aren’t taking into account how you are affecting other people, be it their health, their level of comfort or their children by modeling for them that smoking should be a norm in our society.
We have all been inundated with surveys and statistics about how bad smoking is — whether through direct consumption or secondhand smoke — and each statistic can be countered with another study to prove the other side. But because fighting between the smokers and nonsmokers will never cease, cities like Thousand Oaks and Moorpark have decided to follow Calabasas’ lead and make it more difficult to expose nonsmokers to the carcinogenic plumes of cigarettes through their own anti-smoking ordinances. Thousand Oaks has already adopted a prohibitive smoking law as of last summer, and the Moorpark City Council is currently looking to enact a similar one.
Unfortunately for those who love their smoke breaks, they will have to find isolated areas to indulge. And for the rest of us, the only polluted air we will have to worry about will come from our exhaust pipes. But for the future, in order to prevent similar ordinances from being enacted in other cities where smokers are most likely in the minority, smokers should think about how they would feel if someone else did something that made them uncomfortable and they had no right to tell that person not to do it, because, after all, smokers still get to smoke, just not in the usual areas.
While not every provision of the new laws seems fair, including forbidding smoking in rental homes, it isn’t about the person who is committing the act; it is about everyone else who has to be subjected to it. For this reason alone, Moorpark and Thousand Oaks are headed in the right direction toward putting an end to exposing others to a debilitating habit.
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT
The problem with most smokers is, as you said, their lack of consideration for others. As a nonsmoker, I am fully in favor of smoking bans. If a smoker is near me, no matter how considerate the try to be, I will still be exposed to their smoke. As a nonsmoker my mere presence does not offend or affect the health of smokers. That cannot be said for someone smoking a cigarette. And in close quarters, as in apartment buildings, the problem is even greater.
While common areas may have regulations against smoking, the apartments themselves are not covered. The dwellings are considered private so even if there are laws or ordinances against smoking in a city, the individual apartments are again, not covered. Nothing can be done to prevent a neighbor from smoking in their own apartment, regardless of how it affects neighbors.
I am currently in this situation. I am 8 weeks pregnant and do not want to be expose to any second hand smoke. Unfortunately, my downstairs neighbors are chain smokers. If my windows are open for more than ten minutes at a time their smoke pours into my apartment. In the heat of the summer I cannot have my windows open. My family and I now have to move because legally, nothing can be done to prevent my neighbors from smoking.
Now, even though I am adamantly anti-smoking, I do recognize other people's right to smoke. Unfortunately, their right to smoke trumps my right to clean air and a healthy child. This is not only unfair, it is completely backwards. No one's right to any activity should have more importance than the right to health.
That is the bottom line in my campaign to make my city smoke free. The general public has an intrinsic right to health. Remember "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"? No matter what conflicting research may say, being forced to breathe in hundreds of toxins, many of which are known carcinogens, is wrong.
I made the decision not to smoke when I was very young. The scientific evidence on the dangers of smoking and the scare tactics presented in elementary school worked on me. I've never taken a single puff of smoke. Not a voluntary puff anyway. I cannot avoid cigarette smoke in this city, not even in my own apartment.
Second hand smoke is being forced on me, my husband, our daughter an our unborn child. Though we are not the ones causing a problem with our neighbors, we are the ones who are forced to move. It's sad that the tables would be turned if the problem were something innocuous like loud music.