My dad is a smoker to this day and of course smoked around me when I was a kid. The worst is when we went on long car rides in Alaska in the winter, which was every weekend. No it wasn’t my choice. I hated it, and it did have an affect on me. When I joined the military I had to do a respirator test to paint the planes and part of the test is one on lung capacity. My lung capacity was at 80% of what a female my size/weight should have been. The doctor actually said, “Are you sure you don’t smoke?” But that’s part of life. Parents make a lot of decisions that affect their kids like whether or not to spank and how late they can stay out. People that tell their kids that they’re stupid or that they can’t do certain things with their lives – psychological affects, there is no way to police them.
As of midnight last night Washington State’s latest and biggest set of laws to protect people from themselves went into effect. I admit as a non-smoker it’s would be nice to go to a bar and not have to shower afterwards, but I don’t go that often. It’s not just because of the smoke it’s because I don’t drink much and I’ve never used bars as a place to meet people.
Around here bars are really the last public places for smokers, so really the only time I run into smoky air is when I pass by a group of smokers loitering outside a restaurant. And now they will have to stand 25 feet from any entrance, window or other ventilation, which in downtown Seattle would mean they just can’t smoke – unless they keep walking back and forth in font of the entrance.
Proponents of this say that it’s to save the workers from being exposed, and I understand that second-hand smoke affects people not choosing to participate, but for the most part its children of smokers. How on earth do you police that without just making smoking a crime? In California they tried to pass a law that would allow the police to pull people over who are smoking with a child in the car. It’s just insanity to me because the law doesn’t extend to the home – and how is it supposed to help anything by making parents criminals?
Workers choose where they will work and patrons choose to go to bars and other smoking establishments. The whole single mom, no jobs around stuff is just crap. As if retail jobs or other areas of customer service in non-smoking places just don’t exist, besides at the end of the day she’ll walk outside and take a deep breath of fresh car exhaust air, get into her new SUV with the new formaldehyde car smell, go home to sit on her formaldehyde treated furniture, and dig her feet into her plush formaldehyde treated carpet. Don’t get me started on what she might be using to “freshen” the air or clean her own house on a regular basis. And you can’t tell me that it’s healthy to be inhaling all the kitchen grease from the truck stop diner. It doesn’t cause cancer (that we know of) and it doesn’t raise her cholesterol just by breathing it, but I’m sure it still coats the lungs. And who ever said none of these single moms that we’re trying to save don’t smoke?
This should be a decision for the business not the government. If it’s a smoking place it’ll be up to the non-smoker if they wish be exposed to it. It’s the property of the business owner and people aren’t required to go. It’s not like we’re debating on whether or not smokers can light up in the operating room of a hospital. And Non-smokers have had the whole airplane to themselves for about 20 years now. It’s great, but do we now have to walk into bars and tell them that their infringing on our right to clean air? It’s ridiculous; just go somewhere else if you’re really that sensitive! – taking years off your life, you stupid twit, so are car fumes, perfumes and colognes (neurotoxins, carcinogens and air pollutants).
I just don’t like extra laws that redirect police attention. Telling adults that they can’t smoke in public buildings might stop some people from smoking, which is the desired result of all this smoke policing, but people are still going to smoke, and non-smokers will still catch a whiff of it from time to time. Really this is just another thing that police will use, like speeding tickets, to randomly exercise their authority over other people when they’re having a bad day. If they banned smoking altogether I wouldn’t care at all except that it would add to the “war on drugs” which is useless (except for adding so many people into the prison system that murderers and rapists are released for lack of room), but they’re pretending that these laws aren’t ultimately leading to that.