BBC just showed the new regulations in Australia. From I think it’s today, no branding on cigarette packages allowed. Plain packaging only. A step in the right direction.
EDIT: Yes, from today (Dec 1). Story here. (The name can be shown in small print on the bottom of the box.)
Smoking is not like other personal life choices; cigarette smoke is a Grade A carcinogen, which means that there is no safe exposure level. What that means is no one can say how much exposure to cigarette smoke (first or second hand) will cause you to grow a cancerous tumour - it could be one puff or a million. I make choices with my life and my health; I do not want other people making choices with my health (that is, forcing me to breathe smoke that can kill me).
What makes you think people don’t? In fact, many of those people are the same ones who advocate strict emissions standards of autos and industrial manufacturers. The hatreds of cigarette smoke and industrial pollutants are not mutually exclusive.
Screw the ads! Put that money back into the park system and county highway and recreation departments to clean that shit up and step up enforcement of littering regulations. Fine litterbugs, within an inch of their financial health, and then cycle *that *revenue into raising environmental awareness. Use their own money to blast them with anti-littering messaging.
It doesn’t dissipate at my mom’s retirement home, where some stupid bitch moved in to an upstairs apartment and sits out on the balcony half the day smoking away and coughing her lungs out. The smoke carries, makes her neighbors sick–one of them had to change apartments because she refuses to move and he has emphysema–and my mom can no longer open her back door downstairs because the smoke drifts down there (it comes from just above) and collects in the “pocket” between the back door and the hallway wall.
IMHO, no one else should have to suffer or move just because of her.
I understand completely. I have always been supportive of smokers as long as they don’t impact me or my family directly but the apartment we are in now has made me develop an almost violent hatred for smokers, especially pot smokers. Almost all of the building residents have late teen/early twenties children who sit in the stairwell and smoke all damn day long. Some just smoke cigarettes which is gross but easy enough to ignore. The worst are the potheads who smoke in the building all night and day. Every time I smell it I go out and ask them to move but they’ve gotten to the point where they stop responding to me and because it isn’t a violent crime it always takes the police half an hour to show up so they have moved on by then leaving behind a tell-tale stench and empty cigar wrappers. I can’t wait until our lease is up so we can be rid of these assholes, which is a shame because our apartment is otherwise perfect for us.
Yes, and it’s fucking ridiculous. Thank.you.Nicola.Roxon. Who was it again that you slept with to become Attorney General?
I see that this brilliant strategy will soon extend to alcohol: unbranded bottles of generic size containing only clear, or brown liquid. (NOT).
I for one am waiting for the black market tobacco to arrive. Packaging simple to replicate, and no branding at all on the cigarettes themselves. Too easy!
Good. I’m glad it’s working. I look forward to it being everywhere.
Working? How is it ‘working’?
It’s got at least one smoker all riled up. Great for entertainment value.
Oh. Yay for you then.
See? 
Ah. Small things amusing small minds. Good-o.
This is one of my 3 top peeves. Mandatory C-Butt Patrol for the next 52 weekends for each offender who is caught. Double time if it was done where there is dry brush nearby. Lifetime patrol if your butt started the fire that burnt acreage in a national forest and/or damaged homes/property.
As an ex-smoker who was damaged by it (heart rather than lungs), I loathe and despise smoking.
Because the desire to smoke is still there. It will always be there, a nagging itch at the back of my brain for the rest of my (probably shortened) life.
So I don’t nag smokers or ask them to put it out. I do pity them, because I know that need.
What could explain that? Inaccurate reporting about how carefully they refrain?
Imagine you’re a child growing up in a house with two smokers.
Imagine that every night at the dinner table, the parents light up and blow smoke in the face of the child if the child visibly gags at the smoke.
Imagine that on long trips, they roll up the windows and chain smoke, and the rear passenger side window doesn’t open because it is a van.
Now imagine it’s one of the reasons I don’t speak to my parents.
Lay off the insults in this forum.
What you do to your lungs is your problem, but I really don’t want to have to choke on smoke near the doors to buildings, and I don’t even have respiratory problems. I know people with asthma and such, and they really do have problems with having to breathe second-hand smoke. I do think a lot of smokers, for whatever reason, could be a lot more sensitive to those around them instead of taking a “too bad, so sad, you don’t have to breathe here” attitude that can keep non-smokers from having as much access to restaurants, stores, etc. as smokers do.
What?
Siam Sam gives ‘nah-nah-nah-nah-nah’ replies to my reasonable request for an explanation of how in fact these changes are ‘working’ - and I’m reprimanded?