Smoking in Public Places (errr... similar to banning/taxation?)
Originally posted by Avelorn
oh lord. I feel like I have to write like a 300 page essay to sort all this out.
here is a shorter one I did, about smoking in public :innocent:
I think that smoking in public places, especially around more vulnerable people, should be banned. On the bus that I often travel by, people smoke heavily, paying no regard to the penalties displayed in the windows, or the fact that there are children on the bus. Passive smoking is just as damaging to your health as smoking: prolonged smoking puts you at a high risk of no less than fourteen potentially fatal cancers, clogs up your arteries with fat, and your lungs with sticky black tar. This damages the airways in your lungs, making it difficult to breathe. A Europe-wide study has revealed that children who live with parents who smoke are three times more likely to get lung cancer when they\'re older. A smoker is three times more likely to have a heart attack than a non – smoker. Cigarettes contain arsenic, formaldehyde, benzene, ammonia, nicotine, and thousands of other chemicals. 40,000 people die a year of smoking related illnesses.
And if the fact that people smoke at all isn’t bad enough, people who smoke around you are forcing you to suffer all the above effects, not to mention making it difficult to see and causing you to choke. If someone is sensible enough not to smoke in the first place, they have no choice in the matter if someone smokes around them. So is it not incredibly selfish to smoke in public places? Is it not unfair on children, who are even more vulnerable to the health damage? Is it fair on people with asthma? What about pregnant women? You are much more likely to experience the nightmare of having a stillborn baby, to suffer a miscarriage, or to deliver a low birth-weight baby if you smoke, passively or not. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (or SIDS, for short), a condition in which an apparently healthy baby dies unexpectedly during sleep, occurs twice as often in children born to mothers who smoke, or are exposed to smoke during pregnancy. All these vulnerable people have the right to travel on buses and dine in cafés and restaurants without fear of damaging their health, or losing their baby.
I think that if you are foolish enough to smoke, you should at least let others around you have a choice in it, and not force them to smoke too. Apart from all the aforementioned health risks, if you smoke around someone it makes their clothes smell too. I once met my friend coming off his bus, and he smelled terrible, just as if he was a heavy smoker himself!
On the other hand, it may seem to smokers that if they have the right to buy cigarettes, they should also have the right to smoke them wherever they want, especially as smoking is often a social activity: it’s a free country. However, here it is the rights of the individual versus the rights of the people in general. Smokers have the right to smoke, and they do so, nearly always despite full knowledge of the health risks: non – smokers have the right not to smoke, and do so, because of their knowledge of the health risks, which they don’t wish to inflict upon themselves. It isn’t that easy though, because smoking does not only damage the person who chooses to do it, like, say, drinking. It damages everyone around you, regardless of his or her own choice.
It is the non – smokers’ right to have a choice in the matter: it is not the smokers’ right to take away this right and damage vulnerable peoples’ health. It should have been made illegal a long, long time ago.
Persuasive?
Happy painting
~Bill
