Why do you assert that? Have you a cite?
We’ve already seen by Jackmannii’s cite of the Surgeon-General’s report that second-hand smoking is harmful; where you inhale the fumes doesn’t matter.
A girl I knew in school, who would have acute asthma attacks from even a passing exposure to cigarette smoke, would disagree. Obviously, she was in the minority of people who are so sensitive to smoke, and if a smoker is outside and away from other people or places where foot traffic is regular there is little immediate harm from smoking (aside from litter and attendant hazards to children and wildlife therefrom), but it’s disingenous to claim that smoking “doesn’t harm anybody but yourself,” ever. If nothing else, the health problems associated with smoking pose a significant financial burden upon immediate family, insurance and medical services, and society as a whole. The same could be said about any number of other voluntary behaviors and activities like drinking alcohol, eating fast food, playing competitive sport, et cetera, but this doesn’t diminish the harms from smoking tobacco.
No, not all or even most of it does. Unlike, say, drinking (which has its own attendant hazards), smoking exposes other people directly to the effects, and I’m old enough to remember when smokers didn’t feel any need or pressure to smoke outside. You’d come home from work reeking of cigarette smoke which permeated your clothes, your papers, your hair, everything. In no way could it be said that all of the toxins and residue go into the smoker’s lungs.
I have no real problem with smokers who smoke in designated areas and scavenge their litter, just as I have no problem with alcoholics that stay off the road and don’t engage in violence toward other people. But it’s clear from the responses so far that the o.p. has asked a question, received numerous reasonable responses, and has rejected out of hand all those answers that to not fit with her opinion, making this a pointless topic of discussion. If you’re not prepared to be intellectually honest about the issue, there’s no point asking the question.
Stranger
If your reply isn’t about the ‘harm’ of tobacco smoke, why is it appropriate for GQ? Jokes are one thing, but using the thread as another forum for puritanical sub-Allen-Carr analogies is quite another.
Annoying? Most definitely yes…
Here’s as solid an answer as you can get.
A smoker at a reasonable distance from others not smoking, and not in a path where others must pass through (e.g., near an entryway) is probably not causing harm to others in any measurable way. I.e., you, along with one or two other smokers, sitting on your own porch, patio, or deck, or other open area (e.g., park bench) with other non-smokers not present, are causing a certain amount of air pollution, but in a degree that will disperse and/or precipitate before reaching the “breathing area” of another.
It’s a different story in enclosed areas (the central area of a U-shaped building, for example), congregating smokers at large venues, people loitering in or near entryways, etc.
The thousand cars and trucks of a small town on the Great Plains probably cause more pollution per vehicle than the million cars and trucks of a city in a valley with atmospheric inversion trapping the pollutants in that valley most of the time. But which one is going to cause the greater degree of actual, measurable air pollution? Same principle applies.
Spoken like a true Englishman.
While I’m here: I wish to God these anti-smoking buggers would leave us who are afflicted with the dreaded addiction alone.
I’m sick and tired of hearing the constant bloody whinging by these self appointed guardians and bastions of all that’s good for them.
Leave us alone ferchrissakes, we smoke, get used to it
**Delete “them” insert “Humanity”
This is another one of those things, like not washing your hands after urniating, that high moral people love to say is harmful, yet there is not one verified case of either casusing actual illness.
Sorry, that’s wrong too.
There are many documented cases of Hepatitis A and E. Coli infection transmission due to unwashed hands after urinating. The Hep A virus, and E. Coli manage to live nicely in the entire pubic region.
Just as there is convincing evidence that second-hand smoke is harmful.
So you’re wrong times two here.
Fine. Here is a summary of research on smokers’ littering behavior that notes that “Only 10% of cigarette butts are deposited in litter receptacles” and also that “Over half of smokers say they would change their behavior if they were made aware of the potential environmental impact of littering butts.” Note that if over half of smokers say that they would stop littering butts if they knew it was bad for the environment, that must mean that over half of smokers currently are littering butts.
Believe me, I would be delighted to think that most smokers refrain from littering cigarette butts and other forms of smoking-related trash. But if that were really so, we’d have a lot less cigarette litter out there.
Many documented cases? I’ll be happy with one 
You reject a person’s right to complain about things that are harmful to them? That’s a rather odd position to take.
Sure. Smoking outside in an unpopulated world harms only the smoker. Smoking anywhere that another person breathes the smoke, which certainly happens outside, although it dissipates over distances, is absolutely clearly known to potentially cause that other person all the usual smoking-related illnesses.
“Outdoors” is not some magic state – atmospheric pollutants disspate over time, strong wind, and distance, but toxic/carcinogenic fumes in the air would of course have the same biochemical effects outdoors as they do indoors…except for putative dissipation by the effects noted above.
My personal experience is that longtime smokers badly overestimate the dissipation effect and grossly underestimate the awareness of nonsmokers regarding secondhand smoke.
Sailboat
You can have fifty:
So to avoid spreading disease via the fecal-oral route from the fecal matter that you pick up on your hands when touching the skin in your pelvic region, you should WASH YOUR HANDS AFTER URINATING OR DEFECATING.
For Og’s sake, doctors and epidemiologists have been lecturing the public for years on the health importance of handwashing after using the bathroom, and some folks apparently still choose to believe that this issue is just a personal hangup of “high moral people”. Well, in a way, I suppose it is, if you consider that not wanting to spread shit-borne diseases is an indicator of unusually high morality. Personally, I’d consider it just basic common sense.
It is well documented here that cigarette, pipe, and cigar smoking are harmful to anyone, anywhere, no matter where the smoker and his victim are relative to each other. Smoking causes more deaths per microsecond than the combined deaths of all wars in the 20th and 21st Centuries, combined. The effects of smoking, much like those of electromagnetic fields, are or infinite extent. Although they fall off exponentially (or maybe logarithmically), the effects of smoking on earth will eventually contribute to deaths in every planetary system in our galaxy.
Okay, so I’m being a smart-ass, but this from the surgeon general’s report:
is just crap. This is not a scientific statement, it is a political statement. Unless I’m gravely mistaken, there’s a paucity of peer-reviewed literature along the lines of, say, the lung cancer risk from 30 seconds’ exposure to 10ppb of cigarette smoke. There’s nothing in this thread but opinion, misdirection (I mean, give me a break with the trash argument), and a smidgeon of anecdotal evidence saying that smoking outdoors harms anyone. And scientifically, that doesn’t cut it.
I’m not a big supporter of smoking: it stinks, and when I’m outdoors I tend to sidle away from smokers (or leave altogether if there’s a cigar involved). But the dangers involved have taken on a life of their own, and have outrun hard evidence by a considerable distance.
It’s been pointed out repeatedly that there isn’t a single smoking Doper who leaves trash lying around. Apparently, the Straight Dope counts among its membership all of the non-littering smokers in the world.
Granted, the plural of anecdote is not “data”, but I could walk around my office building right now and fill a small trashcan with cigarette butts.
But the surgeon general’s report wasn’t talking about “the lung cancer risk from 30 seconds’ exposure to 10ppb of cigarette smoke”. Rather, it was talking about all kinds of health risks from secondhand smoke.
Breathing smoke is simply not good for you (and I say this as somebody who voluntarily smokes an average of 2-3 cigarettes annually myself). Even tiny amounts of inhaled smoke can cause asthmatic or allergic reactions in some people who are very susceptible to it.
Sure, there are low-risk levels of smoke exposure, very-low-risk levels, really-tiny-risk levels, however-low-you-want levels, but the SG is right on the money in pointing out that there is no literally risk-free level of smoke exposure. Because breathing smoke is simply not good for you.
This complaint is absurd. If secondhand smoke indoors can be harmful, then secondhand smoke outdoors can also be harmful, depending on how much of it the non-smokers are exposed to. There is nothing magical about the concept of “outdoors” that automatically makes smoke non-existent or non-toxic.
The usual advantage of smoking outdoors is simply that there tends to be enough extra air and air circulation to dilute the smoke much more than in an indoor environment. But this dilution depends on what kind of outdoor environment you’re smoking in. There’s nothing magical about simply crossing the threshold of a building that suddenly removes all the harmful qualities of smoke.
C’mon, people. If you want to argue that smoking outdoors “usually dilutes secondhand smoke to negligible levels” or “usually reduces the health risks of secondhand smoke to negligible amounts”, I’d agree you have a strong case. And I’d also agree that there is no known evidence that smoking outdoors with good ventilation and separate from other people poses any realistic non-negligible health risks, at least in the vast majority of cases.
But trying to extrapolate from those reasonable claims to an impossibly absolutist position like “smoking outdoors never harms anybody (except the smoker) to any extent whatsoever, period” is silly.
Funnily enough, I recognized from the formatting that it’s a question. I was merely wondering if there was anything in particular that ignited the spark of curiosity in you that prompted you to pose it.
I still am, in fact.
Okay, cite a quantitative, peer-reviewed paper about said risks. It’ll be kind of hard to find, because responsible research tends to be a bit more specific. In fact, “cigarette smoke” is probably too general.
How is this more silly than “The scientific evidence indicates that there is no risk-free level of exposure to secondhand smoke?”
Yeah, c’mon, people. Give cites. I still see nothing but opinions and politics.
Because smoke inhalation is bad for you. Claiming that smoke inhalation has risks is true. Claiming that smoke inhalation has no risks is false.
Are you seriously asking for a cite that breathing smoke is bad for you?
I know you can’t be asking for a cite that breathing negligibly small amounts of smoke poses non-neglible health risks, because as I’ve already noted more than once, everybody here already agrees with you that that isn’t true. You did notice that, right?
So what exactly are you requesting a cite for? Please quote the specific statement that you feel needs a cite.
Well, your question is a bit general (ok, this IS the General Question area) and all the variants seem to be covered, ie;
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alone: most likely only harms the smoker,
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in groups with other smokers : I’d say your smoke intake may be somewhat intensified, depending on environment, because of the other smoker’s smoke,
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in or near public areas : likely mostly annoying and temporarily irritating (it causes me to sneeze a lot when I pass through a smoke cloud) and in the long term COULD cause harm to non-smokers just passing through,
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in or near public areas (2) : may cause some real health problems in high risk people (such as asthmatics)
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with non-smokers just hanging around : second-hand smoke causes cancer, just as it would in smokers, BUT the non-smoker can probably move off elsewhere if they were so concerned.
So the answer to your question is yes , it definitely harms you, and in some circumstances may harm others.
My advise to you and all smokers: quit smoking and you won’t harm ANYONE.
As for the risk of second hand smoke, Surgeon General Richard Carmona released this: http://www.hhs.gov/news/press/2006pres/20060627.html saying that “there is no risk-free level of exposure to secondhand smoke.”
Cite enough for ya?