Be Excellent To Each Other

I'm not a biologist or a doctor, so obviously feel free to ignore absolutely everything that follows. For the purposes of disclosure, I quit smoking 5 years ago, but do not despise smokers. Although I do think you're all weak willed fools who may as well just be burning £5 notes every day

Passive smoking may well be a nebulous subject to do research on, but one wonders why one would need to.

Here's my thinking (such as it is).

Inhaling smoke from cigarettes indisputably damages the health of the smoker. Lots. Indisputably. Lots and lots.

I therefore cannot see how that same smoke, either after being breathed in and exhaled out by the smoker or just wafting off from the tip, fails to be harmful to the person sat next to you just because they're not holding the cigarette.

Logically, if smoke = harmful for the smoker, then that very same smoke must be harmful to the person sat next to you breathing it in. For me to be wrong, your lungs must somehow magically purify the smoke of all toxins and carcinogens before you exhale it, which doesn't happen.

And yes, passive smokers will inhale smoke at a lower rate and in smaller quantities than the smokers, but:

(a) passive smoking exposure obviously builds up with time and density of smokers, and bar staff (before the ban) were at a reasonably worrying risk of lung cancer and all that, as they were surrounded by hundreds of smokers for hours on end. We've all been in busy bars where merely breathing in is like smoking a fag, for heaven's sake. See also people who live in a smoking household where everyone smokes indoors.

(b) you only need to smoke one fag to develop lung cancer anyway. You'd have to be mahoosively unlucky, of course, but as there is (as I understand it) a running percentage chance of the carcinogens triggering a cancerous mutation each time they're inhaled, it's a risk. So therefore the same risk applies to a one off passive smoker, and much much more so to those who are repeatedly exposed to passive smoking. And it's not a risk that they're chosing to take. It's one that the smoker is inflicting on them.

As we've now banned smoking in enclosed public spaces we've probably done enough to reduce as far as is reasonably possible the risks to the general public of passive smoking, short of banning smoking outside as well (which would be taking things unecessarily too far). There's still the matter of people who smoke in their own houses around their children - these people are absolute 100% cunts, of course, but if we start mandating that they can't smoke in their own homes we've pretty much banned smoking, which I think we'd all agree would be a silly thing to do (see also every other attempt at prohibition). We should, however, ban smoking whilst pregnant. This has documented ill-effects to the baby, and if you can't get yourself together enough to quit smoking for just 9 months for the sake of the health of your unborn child, you may as well just repeatedly punch yourself in teh bump, too. It makes me very, very sad when I see pregnant women (usually young women/girls) smoking.

So, there we are.

The passive smokers won the legislative argument, and it's just the poor kids (born or yet to be born) living with smoking parents that are left carrying the can(cer) for the rest of us.

my mother smoked when she was pregnant with me, and I'm _fine_.