cjboffoli
Around 400,000 Americans die annually from cigarette smoking making it the leading cause of preventable death. About 50,000 of those are non-smokers who die from secondhand smoke exposure. I guess those folks are just whiners who shouldn’t complain because there are other sources of air pollution which apparently makes cigarette smoke OK.
Each day an estimated 1,100 teens become regular, daily smokers. Between one-third and one-half will eventually die of this addiction. Around the world about 5.4 million people are killed by tobacco smoke every year. According to the WHO, a current or former smoker dies every 6.5 seconds. In China about 2,000 people a day die from smoking. The WHO estimates that smoking will kill more than 8 million people annually by 2030. Tobacco use will kill 1 billion people in the 21st Century if current trends continue.
A dying demographic to be sure.
The California Air Resrouces Board did a study in 2006 in which they measured random outdoor tobacco smoke concentrations outside airports, on college campuses, in government centers, office complexes and amusement parks. Their conclusions were that in these “typical outdoor locations, Californians may be exposed to OTS levels as high as indoor concentrations.”
Some here dismiss the significance of walking through a cloud of smoke for a few seconds if you pass, say, Shadowland on a given night. But if you spend any amount of time walking around this city it is likely not the only time in the course of a day that you will walk through a cloud of cigarette smoke. As indoor smoking bans have moved cigarette smoking onto the street it is nearly impossible to walk into any building (airport, courthouse, hospital, office building) without breathing sidestream smoke with toxic chemicals in much higher concentrations than other sources of pollution in the ambient air. I expect that is why there has been an increase in legislation regulating cigarette smoke in outdoor spaces.