I don’t hate smokers. I don’t have a lot of friends left who are smokers, but that’s mostly because the ones who were, have quit since. Once of them quit a twenty year habit over a weekend! I was impressed.
But like everyone else here, I hate the littering. I don’t like the smell and can smell it from your car when you’re pulled at a light, but I just grit my teeth. But when that car then flicks their damn cigarette out the window I wish I was a big angry man so I could charge up and throw their fucking butt back in their face.
Walking down the street? Throw the butt on the ground, don’t even step on it. Throw it at a gas station. Stand five feet from an outdoor ashtray and throw it on the ground.
Litterers are jerks and smokers are the worst littereres there are.
But I agree that smokers who think they don’t smell like smoke are completely deluded!
Because the incidents of seeing piles of Bud cans and Big Mac wrappers in drifts along the gutter, traffic lights, sidewalks and parks are thankfully rarer. Because I rarely see people tossing empties out the car window. Because aluminum and glass are recyclable, butts are forever. Because I rarely have to share my theater seat with an overlapping obese person, but I have to share space with a sweaty smoker everywhere I go. Never hear a large person horking up a lung and spitting after a Mac. Never had to walk through a cloud of beer burps or Mac farts and had the stench cling to my hair. Never saw a forest fire started by a Mac wrapper. Never had to steer my asthmatic friend away from a drinker or McDonald’s fan. Never watched coworkers take extra breaks daily for a beer. You know the reason. * Because smoking affects other people, and smokers shamelessly spread permanent litter behind them like a shitting antisocial goat.*
I’ve seen three fires caused by cigarettes. Two were caused by college professors. One dropped a still-burning butt on the extremely-dry grass in front of the science building where he worked. I put that one out. The second happened when a different professor (this one taught English) flicked still-burning ash onto a carpet. (Someone else put that one out.)
I didn’t see who dropped the third cigarette butt, but it landed in wood chips.
I’ve seen three fires caused by cigarettes. Two were caused by college professors. One dropped a still-burning butt on the extremely-dry grass in front of the science building where he worked. I put that one out. The second happened when a different professor (this one taught English) flicked still-burning ash onto a carpet. (Someone else put that one out.)
I didn’t see who dropped the third cigarette butt, but it landed in wood chips.
Former smoker here and present hater. I know how most smokers operate, by which I mean I know that most of them flick their ashes and toss their butts indiscriminately, as I used to do. Some start home fires and forest fires, but mostly it just makes a big mess. Smokers’ health issues place a burden on the rest of us in the form of increased insurance premiums and taxes to support those on public health programs because of smoking-related problems. Smokers waste company time and take more sick days than non-smoking employees, which means somebody else has to take up their slack. I’m glad that there are laws restricting where smoking can be done, and which make it uncomfortable for them to do so.
as many have said before, I don’t hate smokers – I have too many friends and relatives who smoke. But I do have smoking because:
1.) Cigarette smoke gives me a headache
2.) The smell is persistent and hard to get out. We don’t want people smoking in the house or our cars. (I grew up being driven in cars that people smoked in all the time. Even when they weren’t smoking, the smell permeated everything. and, as i say, it gave me a headache.)
3.) I don’t have a problem with the “litter”. At least, in that regard, smokers aren’t as bad as the tobacco chewerrs I knew. They’d spit right in the garbage cans. And you had to be really careful about which soda can you picked up.
I think that most people are of the opinion that it’s easier to just not start smoking in the first place.
When my grandfather took up smoking, the general public knew that smoking would usually cause the smoker to cough. However, Big Tobacco released studies showing that smoking was safe, and they had doctors recommending smoking as a cure for certain problems. So, people in my grandfather’s cohort get a pass from me.
When my dad took up smoking, it was considered cool yet safe. Then the Surgeon General came out with that report, and Daddy quit. I don’t think that this was easy for him, but he did it. I find it difficult to blame the people who took up smoking in his generation, and I also find it difficult to blame people who can’t quit, as nicotine is supposed to be very hard to kick. Daddy would have been 81 in a couple of weeks.
I was born in the mid 50s. When I was growing up, we all knew that smoking was a serious health hazard. However, it was still viewed as cool and rebellious, and a great many people took up the habit. Hell, the motto of the time was “Live fast, die young, and leave a good looking corpse”, and certainly a lot of people managed to complete the first two, but failed on the “good looking” part of the corpse thing. I have no sympathy for smokers who are my age or younger. They knew, when they first started smoking, that they were trying to acquire a habit that was unhealthy, and they did it because they wanted the image of a rebel.
Anyone who is younger than me, and who has taken up smoking…well, I feel that they are pretty damned foolish.
It’s possible to eat and drink in moderation. In fact, it’s not possible to avoid eating, though it’s possible to avoid drinking alcohol. Alcohol, when used responsibly, doesn’t have a negative health impact, and some claim that a habit of one or two drinks a day is good for you, if you’re not binging. Smoking provides no benefits, and the smoker knows this when s/he first starts the habit. What’s more, smoking affects other people around the smoker. Always. Now, some people aren’t particularly bothered by second hand smoke, but if I drink a beer, the alcohol doesn’t get into someone else’s bloodstream.
Not hate, and I don’t exaggerate coughing around smokers, but their behavior irks the shit out of me. It’s hard to contain smoke - I guess if you smoked in a bubble it would be fine, but even someone smoking downwind is noticeable and it reeks. I actually don’t mind some cigars and pipes, but cigarettes are absolutely disgusting.
Those airport lounges where smokers congregate? I’m not even sure they have them anymore, but those were hideous. I used to avoid the terminals where they were. I don’t really have many friends that smoke, but they tend to do it at clubs and music venues, not everyday.
I do think it’s incredibly stupid to start smoking at this day and age. We know too much about the dangers of smoking, so much more worse than things like speeding and other adolescent rebellion. It will kill you if you don’t quit, and quitting is incredibly difficult.
My father started smoking so long ago that doctors were telling people it was healthy. They claimed it was “good for your nerves.” I don’t recall him ever not trying to quit, and he finally succeeded, one month before his diagnosis with lung cancer. He died two miserable agonizing years later.
My mother was even more addicted than he was. She couldn’t even be on an airplane for two hours without a cigarette and would purposely schedule flights with stops so she could smoke. She couldn’t go to the hospital for hip surgery, because she would not be allowed to smoke there. It got so she couldn’t walk more than half a block without stopping to rest. The hip problem didn’t really matter at that point, because she was too out of breath to continue. The distance she could go shrank and shrank, but she refused to use a wheelchair. She would stop and sit on the ground and light up a cigarette.
We all assumed, herself included, that her lung problem was smoking-related. She was getting so little oxygen that she wasn’t able to drive safely anymore. When I took her keys and told her I would not give them back until a doctor confirmed that she should be driving, she finally had to try to get answers from her doctor, who had been complicit in helping her avoid them. It turned out that it wasn’t smoking that was affecting her lungs at all, ironically, but autoimmune disease. She died during a diagnostic procedure, but her lungs were in such bad shape that she probably would not have had much longer anyway.
I despise smoking and have my whole life, but I don’t hate smokers. I hate that they are so hard to be around. I hate watching them die when they could have done something before it was too late. Yes, we will all die one day, but why make it so likely to be such a terrible way? I hate that this highly addictive drug is treated like it’s no big deal and I’m glad that that’s changing. When I was a child in the 70s, smoking was so normal that teachers smoked in classrooms, grocery carts had built-in ashtrays, and I was hospitalized several times with pneumonia with no one but me ever suggesting that second-hand smoke could be a factor!
**Second hand hamburger grease doesn’t kill 50000 people a year **(just in the USA). Everyone gets to choose your own particular handbasket to go to hell in, but when you smoke, you force others to die along with you. What’s worse, it’s mostly the young or elderly.
[QUOTE=Lynn Bodoni]
It’s possible to eat and drink in moderation. In fact, it’s not possible to avoid eating, though it’s possible to avoid drinking alcohol. Alcohol, when used responsibly, doesn’t have a negative health impact, and some claim that a habit of one or two drinks a day is good for you, if you’re not binging. Smoking provides no benefits, and the smoker knows this when s/he first starts the habit. What’s more, smoking affects other people around the smoker. Always. Now, some people aren’t particularly bothered by second hand smoke, but if I drink a beer, the alcohol doesn’t get into someone else’s bloodstream.
[/QUOTE]
Many of you are chiming that smokers affect other people while overeaters don’t. You’re wrong.
Smoking leads to second-hand smoke, which leads to cancer, yes. But drinking leads to drunken driving, which leads to death. Yet there’s far less stigma for drinking, even excessively.
It’s not the same though. It’s not like 50% of people who drink will die as a result of alcohol. It’s not like having a glass of wine means you will drive drunk. Even having 10 beers doesn’t necessarily mean you will drive drunk. Having a cigarette near people means they will certainly breathe the smoke. Even if you have just one. Even if you move away a little. Recent studies even show that parents going outside to smoke bring smoke back inside with them and that has a negative effect on the health of their children.
Drunk driving = negative effect on others
Smoking = negative effect on others
Drinking =/= negative effect on others
Not to mention leading to increased risk of heart disease and sudden cardiac death, pulmonary disease, increased incidence of SIDS and low birth-weight babies, etc.
Hmm, seems to me as if there’s plenty of stigma associated with drunken driving. Imparied drivers are not getting a free pass these days by any stretch of the imagination.
No, it doesn’t. Drinking MIGHT lead to drunken driving. I drink. I drink at home, and then I don’t drive for a couple of hours, at least. Or I drink at a restaurant…when someone else is driving. Even if I got in the car and drove, though, I would probably pass a sobriety test, because I only have ONE drink on any given day. I’m a cheap date, though, and alcohol seems to affect me more than it affects most people.
I’ll admit that people around me might be adversely affected if I drink, because I will use this as an excuse to sing, usually show tunes, but occasionally Nanny Ogg’s infamous Hedgehog song.
I have worked in an office that cannot simply have everyone get up and leave for a quick smoke. And yet it seems to be acceptable for smokers to get a few 15 minute breaks throughout the day to “grab a quick one.” But if a non-smoker is 5 minutes late getting back from lunch then there is hell to pay.
If you want to smoke, fine. Do so on your own time. Do not expect me to do double work so you can feed your addiction.
Outside the workplace I simply avoid smokers and smoky environments. Fortunately one of my favorite hobbies is scuba diving and it is hard to feed a nicotine addiction underwater.