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Secondhand Smoke

Also known as ETS, environmental tobacco smoke, is the mixture of smoke that is exhaled from a smoker and raw smoke burning off the end of someone's cigarette. This smoke is inhaled by nonsmokers causing approximately 49,400 deaths per year in people that have never smoked a single cigarette. (source: California Environmental Protection Agency. Identification of Environmental Tobacco Smoke as a Toxic Air Contaminant. Executive Summary. June 2005.)

Secondhand smoke is thought to be even more deadly and debilitating than actually smoking. But the sad fact is, is that smokers don't care. Smokers think so intently that their need and desire for having that cigarette outweighs you not having to breathe it as well.

I've seen the most caring, loving and empathic people you could ever meet light right up in front of family and friends, knowing the dangers of secondhand smoke. I had done it myself, many times. Hindsight is always 20/20. I can think back to particular instances where I lit up near children whose lungs are still growing and impressionable, but did it anyway.

The truth is that any aroma of cigarette smoke that is able to be smelled is causing damage. Just like if you only smelled a little bit of Mustard Gas everyday, it would be causing you damage. The same is true of cigarette secondhand smoke.

The more common rationalization smokers use is, "Oh it won't kill ya!".

Well actually, it will. Of the billions of cells EVERYDAY that need to be properly disposed of in our bodies, if that one off-handed sniff of secondhand smoke is the one that lets that ONE mutated cell morph into cancer, then that one sniff actually did kill that person. Of course, they might not know it for years, but there it was; walking past the two smokers as you go into the Sears store some afternoon when you had to walk through their cloud, your body missed a cell...