Is there any scientific evidence that smoking outdoors harms anyone?
Well, it harms the smoker, obviously.
After that, it depends on what you mean by ‘harm’. If you smoke at an outdoor gathering, others present may be offended/upset/repelled or whatever. They may find the smoke or the smell unpleasant. Does that count as ‘harm’? Or are you asking about physiological, medical effects?
It really doesn’t matter where the smoker smokes his tobacco; there is an incredibly vast and definitive body of evidence that smoking is harmful.
To herself, yes, but to the world in general?
Smokers forced outside tend to congregate around the building entrance, forcing others to walk through a cloud of smoke to get inside. Although the odds of one exposure like this causing cancer in an individual is tiny, enough exposures of enough people will cause harm.
Also, smokers are pigs, to put it bluntly. They throw their butts, ash, packets, matches, foil, cellophane wrapping and of course smoke away (that is, towards others); something like half of all litter comes from smokers.
I have little tolerance for smoke and barely more for most smokers, but I’ll dispute that claim. I can’t believe without a cite that there is more smoking related litter than fast food container litter.
In addition to that, some people are particularly sensitive to the effects of tobacco (and other caustic) smoke, and even a minor exposure to it can result in a basophil histamine reaction. In addition to that, and widely unappreciated by smokers, most tobacco smoke and particularly that from the highly processed and chemically impregnated tobacco used in cigarettes just smells eye-wateringly rank. It may be “less harmful” in an outside environment where it can disperse, but it can’t be considered not-harmful, and certainly not-annoying in any detectible concentration.
Stranger
Is the OP’s question apropos of anything in particular?
In other words, no, it doesn’t harm anybody but yourself, unless you’re standing right next to somebody. Even then, it’s highly doubtful.
Don’t fucking generalise.
Some of us smokers don’t throw our ash/packets etc away.
There are those among us who have the decency to carry our rubbish home and dispose of it that way.
Incidentally, I am not a pig…so fuck you…to put it bluntly
Also, you’re talking out of your arse when you state that half of all litter comes from smokers
How do you get that out of the responses posted so far? I think it’s fair to say that most people will not be noticeably affected by exposure to drifting cigarette smoke outdoors, but that doesn’t mean that people who are noticeably affected (suffering asthma attacks from it, etc.) aren’t being harmed.
Kudos to you, but AFAICT you’re in the minority among smokers. I would not consider it polite to call smokers as a group “pigs”, but I don’t think you can fairly claim that most of them are conscientious about not littering with their smoking debris. Most smokers seem to feel that a cigarette butt or a burnt match doesn’t count as “trash” and may be left on the ground for someone else to clean up. IMHO, this is marginally tolerable on city streets but pretty darn gross at the beach, for example.
Um, careful, this ain’t the Pit.
It’s a question. How does it harm anyone if people smoke outside?
From the lack of opposing evidence, I assume it does not.
:dubious: How do you get anything less?
If I walk out onto my front porch… the nearest human is my wife, who is inside the bedroom. She’s roughly 25 feet away and separated by 2 layers of brick, at least 1 layer of plywood, and probably 6 layers of drywall.
After that, well, we have the neighbors across the street, they’re at least 100 feet away, and the neighbors to our right, at least 150 away.
Please explain how I’m hurting ANY of them.
Yeah, it isn’t, but AFAICT your “AFAICT” assertions don’t belong in GQ either.
Where do you think all those toxins go? They don’t disappear just because the smoker happens to be outside.
Into the smoker’s lungs, actually.
Are you sure? I doubt smoking related litter contributes half of all litter in terms of weight or volume, to be sure, but if we’re talking number of items, I wouldn’t be surprised if half of all littered items were cigarette butts or other smoking related trash. And the statistics on this site seem to bear out that estimate.
And smoking litter can be disproportionately time-consuming to clean up, too, as it gets stuck in cracks and buried in vegetation, etc., and isn’t as easy to retrieve as a plastic bottle or burger box.
You’re not, AFAICT. But the OP didn’t ask “Does it harm anyone if I’m smoking outdoors at least 25 or 100 feet away from all other people and separated from them by exterior and interior walls?” She asked “Is there any evidence that smoking outdoors harms anyone [presumably excepting the smoker]?”
And the answer obviously depends on how much of your smoke other people are having to breathe in that outdoor location.
Are you seriously disputing the claim that smokers who never litter their cigarette butts or other smoking-related trash are in the minority among smokers? Because if so, I’ll go dig up some cites for you.
Just dig them up.
I had a big reply ready but my damn laptop bugged out again.
edit: Please, no “ButtsOUT”. That is not a reputable source.
If we’re talking solely about physical effects of toxic agents in cigarette smoke - smoking outdoors causes an increased risk of health hazards to the smoker and anyone exposed to secondhand smoke.
Obviously the latter hazard is greater the more concentrated the source of smoke (i.e. smokers congregating near an entryway) or if ventilation is limited (as in a stadium or similar outdoor venue.
The recent Surgeon General’s report is a good source of information about secondhand smoke hazards.
Harmful? Probably not.
Annoying? Most definately yes.
I draw this comparison. Imagine someone who has such terrible body odor that you can smell them when you get within 5 feet of them. And that you can still smell that person even after they have left the scene because their stench likes to stay in the air and on surfaces. This stench is so bad that hotels actually have seperate rooms for people with body odor. And if you go to a bar where a bunch of these people with horrible B.O. like to hang out, when you get home your clothes now reek of their body odor.
Now there’s probably very little if any harm that body odor stench is doing to you, however, that doesn’t mean it’s not totally disgusting and annoying.