Word: smokes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...scenery passes less quickly. A five-story apartment building looks somber with its dirtencrusted windows and greasy Venetian blinds. Opposite, a group of tenement houses stand in the glare of DuPont's smoke and flames. The passengers waiting on the platform of Philadelphia's Thirtieth Street Station look like molish members of a dust-filled underworld. The train pulls out into a complex of electric power lines, intricately crossing tracks, and still freight cars. It then runs parallel to a river, crosses over, and continues through a residential area. To the right, a small rowboat drifts lazily on a pond...
...then, can smokers unabashedly pollute the air? Why do non-smokers let them do it (particularly those 34 million in the U.S. that the American Medical Association estimates are sensitive to cigarette smoke)? Somehow, our sense of protocol and courtesy has been turned inside out. It is not considered rude to smoke in public; it is considered rude to ask someone not to smoke, or to answer "Yes" when asked, "Does anybody mind if I smoke?" Despite federal regulations requiring separate smoking and nonsmoking sections on trains and airplanes, it is considered rude to ask a passenger...
...smokers who breathe "second-hand smoke" (the Surgeon General calls it "passive inhalation") suffer the same adverse consequences as smokers. Seconds after breathing cigarette smoke, the non-smoker's heart beats faster, his blood pressure rises, and the carbon monoxide in his blood increases. The non-smoker might even face a greater danger from cigarettes than the smoker. The cigarette filter often protects the smoker; the non-smoker has no such protection and must breathe the smoke that wafts his way from the cigarette's end. That unfiltered smoke contains more cadmium than is contained in filtered smoke. (Cadmium...
SMOKERS HAVE always assumed the right to smoke in public and most non-smokers have never questioned that assumption. No such right exists, just as there is no right to sneeze on other people, an action considered more obnoxious but which is actually no more harmful than blowing smoke on other people. Smokers often defend their right to smoke in public under the banner of freedom of choice. For example, when former HEW Secretary Elliot L. Richardson '41 prohibited smoking in all of the Department's auditoriums and conference rooms, an indignant employee wrote to him protesting that such...
...choice is not personal; it is public. The smoker has no right to determine the quality of air that the rest of those in a room will breathe. And there is no public good to be weighed against the damage smoking causes, as one can weigh the benefits of the automobile against traffic deaths. There is nothing good about smoking. It relieves tension, but it also causes it. It keeps some smokers from getting fat, but it robs them of good health in the process. If, after considering this, smokers do not want to quit, that is a matter...