Well, there was quite a wind blowing, force 5 or 6 I’d say, but that’s not to say that I didn’t inhale some exhaust fumes from some vehicle or other, maybe my own, maybe yours(if you have one), blown way across the ocean.
Oh, wait, what I really meant to say was:
:rolleyes:
You are correct that using a ‘slippery slope’ argument constitutes a logical fallacy (even if history is replete with anecdotal evidence of the slippery slope at work) so let me take a different tack.
Say smoking around children is deemed abuse. Where do you draw the line at what constitutes smoking around children? At one extreme we have Cletus and Lurlene and assorted family members chain smoking up a storm with an infant in the middle of it all and at the other we have the parent who steps outside for a smoke but lets a puff drift in when he/she opens the door to come back in. At what point is a person deemed guilty of child endangerment? In addition, what penalties do you support against the smoker that don’t actually impact the child worse (ala throwing mommy or daddy into prison or fining them into bankruptcy)?
Again I’ll reiterate that I don’t like it but I don’t see what you can reasonably do in the legal system to prevent it.
Hmmm
Say Beating children is deemed abuse. Where do you draw the line at what constitutes beating children? At one extreme we have Cletus and Lurlene and assorted family members repeatedly punching an infant in the face and at the other we have the parent who clips their child around the ear for minor misdemeanours. At what point is a person deemed guilty of child endangerment? In addition, what penalties do you support against the child-beater that don’t actually impact the child worse (ala throwing mommy or daddy into prison or fining them into bankruptcy)?
:d&r:
Or who simply smells of smoke when he comes back in.
Or the nonsmoker who shoots some pool in the bar before coming home form work and smells of smoke for the rest of the evening?
Or the nonsmoker who goes takes his kid to a restaurant with a snoking section?
The fact that many things are a continuum of greys rather than solid black or white (age of consent, blood alcohol level when driving etc) doesn’t prevent us from defining a point to which one side is OK and the other side is ‘not OK’, why could we not define a point at which forced passive smoking is unacceptable?
How about the parent who phones his kid while smoking???
ABUSE!
I think Snoking in public is disgusting and should be outlawed, won’t somebody please think of the children?
Dammit, Mange, I was about to ridicule myself for that. 
Yeah. Think of all those poor snoked kids. You never can re-snoke them, you know.
I think defining a point where disciplining your child crosses into abuse is easier than defining a point where your child is exposed to too much cigarette smoke.
You’d have to issue everyone with little smoke detectors that monitor airborn smoke concentrations then make a matrix of how many breaths in any given level is permissable then have the parents graph their child’s exposure over time (don’t forget the breathing monitor attached to the child that counts the number of breaths the child takes). Anyone with a child may be stopped at anytime by the police and asked to see their Child Clean Air Log Book[sup]tm[/sup].
Also, and maybe this is just me, I find a kid getting punched around by his/her parent more reprehensible than a child sitting in a smoking section. The abused child is better off with the abuser in jail in than having the abuser to remain to smack the kid around.
You’re right, of course, but because something is difficult to control, that means we shouldn’t try to control it?
**
Again, you are right; this is why I ducked and ran.
I’m in no doubt that a child regularly exposed to the sort of levels of smoke that I witnessed (in the incident I described above) experiences a higher level of risk of smoking related ailments; this seems unfair on the child, although I’m still not sure if I’d want to call it abuse.
I think smoking should be banned all together. I’ve noticed that smokers take what, like 5 drags of their cancer rod and let the rest smolder away. Thank you, like the kids need that. If you smoke you need to inhale the whole thing and exhale into a bag of some sort. Then everyone is happy.
I don’t think you should smoke around your young children at all. A friend at work and her husband both smoke. She gave up smoking while pregnant. She is now smoking again. Even though they step outside to smoke, it’s still allowing their kids (2 daughters, a 4yr old and a 1yr old) to grow up in a smoker’s environment. Sure, the parents aren’t smoking in the same air that their kids breathe (directly on them, etc) but isn’t being a parent who smokes bad enough? 
Released last year…call it tobacco company propaganda if you must:
**"**Who can now take a good long deep breath? The World Health Organization can, and although they are reluctant to admit it, we all can. In a definitive study on passive smoking, sponsored by the World Health Organization released three weeks ago, it was revealed that second-hand smoke poses no cancer risk at all. Never mind that the study is one of the largest ever to look at the risks of passive smoking, no one at WHO headquarters in Geneva would comment on the findings.
One would think that WHO would be delighted at this good news. They should be anxious to let us all know that we can now breathe the air around us without fear of second-hand smoke causing everything from flat feet to baldness. Had the research found a definite relationship between passive smoking and lung cancer in non-smokers, results more suited to WHO’s self serving agenda, you can be sure their comments and statements would be well publicized. The only coverage in the U.S. press we could find was an article in the Wall Street Journal, March 19. A copy of which is on reverse side.
The study compared 650 lung cancer patients with 1,542 healthy people in seven European countries. The results were expressed as “risk ratios,” with 1 being the normal risk for a non-smoker to contract lung cancer. The “risk” rose to 1.16 with exposure to smoke in the home and to 1.17 for exposure in the work place. The margin of error in the study is so wide - .93 to 1.44 - that the true risk ratio could be inconsequential or nonexistent. This certainly seems to show that while smoke may be annoying to some, science does not show that second-hand smoke is a lung cancer risk.
In 1988, the International Agency on research on Cancer declared tobacco smoke a carcinogen. If smokers are at risk, surely anyone around them must be as well. Assuming that science would prove this to be true, many countries rushed, in the name of public health, to enact anti smoking policies. Our own EPA states that 3,000 Americans dies annually from second-hand smoke.
California has imposed a total smoking ban in all public places. California was not the first to dictate such a ban. Iran did the same in 1996, but there it was overturned as unconstitutional.
We, in our close knit tobacco family, along with less hysterical non-smokers have always felt that the dangers of passive smoking have been greatly exaggerated and that the results of “scientific” studies are manipulated to match predetermined political ends. Perhaps the anti tobacco zealots have cried wolf one too many times. Their credibility has again been tarnished as their discredited scientific “facts” go up in a cloud of harmless second-hand smoke."
Not only should it be considered child abuse, any jerk who smokes in a public area designated as a nonsmoking area (such as virtually my entire campus, which damn near none of the smokers, evidently, heeds) should be held accountable for assault, or rather for being just too stupid to live.
I liked the example about the parents smoking when the child has asthma.
This recently came up in a situation at my hospital. The attending doctor taking care of this child repeatedly told the parents “your smoking is making your child’s asthma worse. You need to quit smoking”. For those of you that don’t know, asthma is a life threatening condition. I’ve seen so many kids end up intubated and almost dead because of horrible asthma attacks. Why would parents still smoke around their child if they had asthma?? I don’t get it. Well, anyway, the doctor finally told them after the child’s attacks got more frequent and worse (this man is known to lay it on the line) “If you don’t stop this smoking, it constitutes neglect of your child’s health and we’ll report you to DHS and your child could get taken away from you.”
in no way is it abuse. bad parenting, sure. but not abuse.
think of it this way. would it be abuse for parents to feed their kids nothing but fast food?
(assuming of course that we agree that fast food is generally unhealthy)
But so is using pesticides but it will be abuse if used around children every day.
I think a little exposure to smoke will actually help them (develope tolerance) but to be around someone who smokes every day and in an enclosed room torchure, abuse, assalt - and the person who is doing this to a child should be strung up.
If you want to smoke - I have no problem - but if other people have to inhale your exhaust and object then I have a problem (exceptions make for your own properity). I’m not worried about 2nd hand smoke - just it’s as annoying as heck to smell that crap!
I disagree. If a child is allergic to peanuts, and runs the risk of death every time they eat them, and the parents keep peanuts in the house, and the kid is constantly in the ER with anaphylactic shock because of it, then that is abuse.
The same thing applies to smokers whose kids have asthma that worsens in the presence of smokers.
I’m not saying that smoking around kids automatically constitutes abuse. It doesn’t. But there are situations where it clearly is child abuse.
How could you say that you love your children and fill their lungs with second hand smoke or show them how to take it in first hand…abuse?..not sure…Very STUPID…NO DOUBT
My thoughts
… Angelslantern…from Truthsearchers