Smoking In Public Safe Or Not?

Smoking in Public, Safe or Not?

According to a article titled "Restricting Smoking in Public Places?" published in the July 21, 1986 U.S. News and World Report, five thousand people die each year because they have breathed someone else's smoke (65).This finding alone should be enough to encourage smokers to consider the health of those non-smokers around them before they light a cigarette in a public place. However this does not seem to be the case considering the results of a more recent conducted in 1997 which shows that the five thousand deaths per year in 1986 due to secondhand smoke has drastically increased to thirty eight thousand deaths per year, three thousand due to lung cancer and thirty five thousand due to heart disease (1997). Is smoking a cigarette while you eat lunch really worth the life of the innocent seven year old sitting across the restaurant? I think not.

I am appalled that even with these findings owners of restaurants and other businesses are still allowing smoking in their businesses. Do they really think that they are helping prevent any health risk to their non smoking customers by having smokers in a separate section? Does separating smokers from non-smokers really work? Would having a urinating section in a public swimming pool work? The effectiveness of the two is really not much different. In both you are trying to separate something that is going to move through the environment in which they are in no matter how you try and separate them. In an article in U.S. News and World Report titled, "Restricting Smoking in Public Places?" Paul Serevane writes that keeping smokers separate is expensive. He bases this opinion on claims that it would cost $265 million a year in New York alone to have separate sections for smokers (65). For me you cannot put a price on a life and if $265 million a year is what it would cost one state to save thousands then what is stopping them? In the same article he also writes that he cannot see any real proof that secondary smoke poses a threat and that non smokers are just trying to gain power over smokers. Obviously he has not done much research on the effects of second hand smoke or he would have found the same findings that Joseph Califano, an author who wrote in the same article found, which stated that five thousand people die each year from secondhand smoke. If Mr. Serevane is ignorant or inconsiderate is something I may never know, but I do know he should research more on a subject before writes an editorial for a magazine concerning that subject.

New research done in 2004 shows that the Philip Morris tobacco company conducted research in the 1980's showing secondhand smoke was highly toxic, yet the company concealed the information for two decades. (9946) Further more if there were no reasons for non-smokers to worry about what smokers were polluting the air with in regards to their