According to some politicians’ “expert staffers”, exposing your child to second-hand tobacco smoke is tantamount to child abuse. Second-hand smoke is supposed to greatly shorten a child’s life, according to these “experts”. These “experts” want to take away your kids and jail you if you smoke near them.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, when I was a child, 70% of adults
smoked–not only in the home, but virtually everywhere that it wasn’t a fire hazard to do so.(Some numbskulls even smoked in those places.)
My home was atypical in that neither of my parents smoked. However, everyone else’s kids reeked of smoke. And their parents smoked around me all the time.
The entire Baby Boom grew up immersed in tobacco smoke.
And yet-- the same people who say that our kids and grandkids are being" fatally abused "by tobacco smoke are also claiming that we Boomers, who grew up surrounded by clouds of the stuff, are going to live to be 110 and break the Social Security system unless they raise our payroll taxes .
If the majority of us Boomers drops dead in our late 60s to early 70s, will our children’s and grandchildren’s S.S. taxes be reduced to reflect this? Of course not!
If our exposure to smoke is not going to kill us all before our time, then why worry about the considerably-lesser exposures todays kids get?
As a lifelong non-smoker, I must say that I preferred it when cigarette smokers were dispersed throughout a building to the way it is now with concentrated clouds of smoke at every building entrance. I also don’t think that most people who’ve never smoked are anywhere near as militantly anti-smoking as the ex-addicts;many of whom are giant pains in the ass.
I didn’t say that second-hand smoke didn’t cause health problems;but it is obvious that if the Baby Boom generation, which was thoroughly immersed in second-hand smoke throughout childhood, is expected to live long enough and in large enough numbers to break Social Security the risks are being vastly overstated.
And if we really are all doomed to die early deaths due to second-hand smoke, then our children and grandchildren are being ripped-off by high taxes that are being collected under false pretenses.
The government is lying to us one way or the other.
BTW, the record number of people living beyond 80–the group who smoked all those cigarettes whose smoke the Boomers inhaled second-hand as kids-- tends to make me believe that the “health police” are the liars.
The fact that medical technology is so advanced now that they are able to detect and remove cancers, thus prolonging a person’s life, does not change the fact that smoking – and second hand smoke – contributes to cancer development. What if another study suggested that these Boomer who will live to 110 could have lived to 120 if they were not so exposed to smoke as children? (I’d actually like to see a study of that sort)
I’d like to see the statistics to back this up. What I can find in brief googling (NIH and other government data in the form of tables in microscopic print) suggests that at their peak, smokers accounted for maybe 57% of so of adults, as opposed to 20-25% now). So it’s a stretch to say that kids in the '50s and '60s grew up “immersed in tobacco smoke”.**
There’s a lot more at stake in the fight over secondhand smoke than overall death rates. Should children be unnecessarily exposed to a higher risk of bronchial infections and asthma, or a worsening of asthma attacks, even if such conditions are not fatal?**
We disagree.
If clouds of smoke at building entrances pose a problem, establish no-smoking zones to extend 50 or 100 feet from the entrance. That’ll disperse the clouds. And a few fat fines will help convince the litterbugs not to throw their butts all over the place.
I’ve been told before (no cite I’m afraid) that the reason that they don’t have smoking rooms any more is because it saves a fortune in insurance costs for the building.
Even as a smoker I tend to think that bunches of people hanging around the doorways puffing away must have a negative affect on visitors perception of a company. But I respect their right to have whatever rules they want, particularly if it saves them more money – which allows them to pay their workers better (at least in theory).
Well, I’ve known a few airports to have smoking lounges (often on the wrong side of security, though), and I’ve been to businesses that had them, too. So apparently some companies find it worth their effort.
Yes, there is, kind of. It is called dilution of the smoke into atmospheric air. To avoid anything short of an apples to oranges comparison, one would have to be sucking on the lighted end of the cigarette!
:smack:
I am not a smoker, and I don’t have a desire to put myself in a position where my clothes and hair reek, but it is not my place to tell the smoker he cannot engage. And I especially don’t support the Smoking Nazis who have nothing better to do than tell YOU how you should live YOUR life. Smoking around children as “child abuse”? Hardly. Bad judgement regarding the health of the kid, perhaps. Gawd knows the kid, and the parents already breathe enough crap in the air daily from our advanced society.
These brainless busy bodies have NO CLUE as to what child abuse really is. I will guess that they are merely using the “child sympathy” card to dissuade you from pouring cigarette smoke into your own lungs by your own choice.no clue
My mother died of lung cancer, I kept smoking. After all, she had quit 20 years beforehand, if it was going to get me the damage was likely already done, I had already smoked for longer than she had.
My cat died of lung cancer. I quit
I respect everyone’s rights to decide for themselves but I am pleased that people are being discouraged from doing it near their kids.
In the grand scheme of things, I don’t think that smoking should carry as dreadful a label as some of the other behaviors parents engage in that fall under the category of ‘child abuse’.
If they’re going to lump smoking in with child abuse, then they might as well start taking away kids from parents who feed them McDonald’s for dinner every night and allow them to eat too much candy at the movies. For that matter, they might as well start telling parents they’re being abusive if they let their kids watch too much t.v., or if they own pets, or if they let them drink tap water, or swim in the ocean, or live in a city, or do anything other than raise them in a bubble.
Lord knows we’re subjected to thousands of carcinogens daily that we have no control over. We don’t even know what kinds of chemicals and ingredients are in half the stuff we come into contact on a daily basis. The emissions from cars, the chemicals used to clean our clothes, the packaging for our food, the beauty products we use, the water in our bathtubs, even the money we give our kids to buy lunch with all carry the possibility of posing a health risk.
I’m with Macauly Connor that anyone who would equate this to child abuse is truly clueless. If this is the biggest thing you’ve got to worry about in your child’s life, consider yourself extremely lucky.
Exactly. I was one of the sickliest kids around. I had constant bronchits when I was little. I was probably hospitalized about 2 times a month because of breathing difficulties. I currently am an asthma sufferer (and, FWIW, asthma kills lots of people).
My mom and dad smoked the whole time I was growing up. When I was a baby, my mom breast fed me while smoking a cigarette.
She says herself that, at the time, she didn’t know better, but there’s no way she would ever expose a child to 2nd hand smoke now.
Frankly, I think it is child abuse. If you want to smoke, go outside.
<< Back in the 1950s and 1960s, when I was a child, 70% of adults smoked–not only in the home, but virtually everywhere that it wasn’t a fire hazard to do so. >>
Back in the 1800s, when I was a child, 70% of children were beaten as part of normal training and discipline. Back in the 1700s, when I was a younger child, infant mortality was somewhere around 40%. Sorry, but the argument that “it didn’t hurt us then” is loony.
And please not that second-hand smoke doesn’t necessarily just cause lung cancer, it causes or magnifies diseases like asthma and emphyzema as well… which have been rampant amongst the baby boomer generation.