Passive smoking

It’s quite common to see people in wheelchairs smoking at the entrance to hospitals, Usually they are in wheelchairs because they have had feet or toes amputated as a result of diabetes; if there is one thing guaranteed to worsen their poor circulation, it is cigarettes. Yet still they smoke. But the prize for acute suicide by cigarette in hospital goes to Philip Hoe, 60, who lit up on a fire escape at Doncaster Royal Infirmary, where he was being treated for a skin condition. The treatment, in his case, had been to swathe him in a mixture of paraffin and kerosene wax. He had been told this was inflammable, but he lit up anyway. He died a few hours later in the specialist burns unit of a Sheffield hospital.

But even this, however criminally stupid, couldn’t really be said to have harmed anyone else. A real cynic might point out that if you have to die, you might as well do so in a way that gives pleasure to millions of people all around the world. If he’d burned the whole hospital down, that would have been damage from passive smoking. It might have been one of the first recorded instances of harm done by other people’s cigarettes.

I don’t smoke myself any longer, and I don’t miss it more than seven days a week, but the argument that you should give up because it harms other people has always seemed to me completely bogus medically. It’s certainly much less damaging to be around smokers than to be around drunks. Dominic Lawson claims to have published a study proving this, when he was editor of the Sunday Telegraph.

On the other hand, even if he and I are right – especially if we’re right – the assault on "passive smoking" does demonstrate that anti-smoking seems a moral cause: we feel, instinctively, that morals must be binding on everyone. If smoking were treated as merely unhealthy, we would not mind other people doing it any more than we mind tem drinking. But but because it is treated as immoral, the anti-smoker is not satisfied not to be smoking themselves. They want a world where no one smokes and enjoys it. This makes perfect sense if moral sentiments are in fact an adaptation to group living, as Herbert Gintis argues. The great problem with altruism, in a Darwinian world, is to stop others taking advantage of you by not behaving as you do. The smoker, if they are violating a moral rule, is threatening everyone who doesn’t; and all the fuss about "passive smoking" is merely dramatising this intuition.

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13 Responses to Passive smoking

  1. sjhoward says:

    As a medical student, I walk into a hospital every day. And every day, without fail, there are pregnant women, usually in their teens or early twenties, standing outside underneath a no-smokng sign and a large “Smoke Free Hospital” banner, with a cigarette in their hand. Even through the winter, they are stood in dressing gowns doing this. And I wonder if they know the harm being caused to their unborn child.

    Surely this is the perfect example of smoking doing harm to someone else?

  2. acb says:

    Point taken: pregnant women shouldn’t smoke — but then pregnant women shouldn’t do all sorts of things that don’t harm anyone outside their bodies. The foetus is not being harmed by the smoke that the mother exhales, which is what’s normally meant by passive smoking.

  3. Will says:

    A compromise position is possible. Having never smoked a cigarette in my life, and totally unconvinced or unconcerned by the medical evidence on the negative effects of passive smoking, I still push for smoking bans, not because I find smoking immoral, but because of the penetrating and persistent odor. After a night out at a smoky bar, one’s hair and clothes smell horribly of cigarettes and must be immediately washed. A jacket taken into a pub can’t be worn for another week or more; a backpack, which no one really washes, is temporarily ruined. As for me, the smoke bothers my eyes and causes minor allergic reactions. Forget about the (permanent) health effects, what about the temporary discomfort? Isn’t arriving home with black mucus disgusting enough to take some action?

    I suspect that if smoking were odorless, colorless, and, well, smoke-less, no one would fuss about the health effects. Everyone I know feels the same way: we can’t wait for the smoking ban so that our clothes will smell like they did when we entered the bar and we pretend to care about the health effects to further this cause.

  4. SRW says:

    (For the second time of trying)

    I could summarise Will’s comments (the substance of which I tried to post earlier but it failed) by reprising a (familiar?) line: “Why are people such arseholes while they’re smoking?” (or while they’re defending their “right” to pollute my air)

  5. Saltation says:

    i was about to take slight issue with your last para’s “moral” note, to the effect that most of the “antismoking” rantyness comes from people seeking status authority/control over other people using something of generally-agreed value as the playing-chip.
    then i suddenly realised your definition of “moral” seemed to flesh out a key gnawing-hole in my own developing framework-of-humans: your definition’s slight twist on the normal definition very neatly fitting with the rest of my framework. thank you very much!

  6. Rupert says:

    I think that’s right. Perhaps I move in the wrong circles, but nobody I know agrees with the official scale of moral indignation over drugs. Plenty of friends agree that, inasmuch as you can bundle so many disparate things into one, drug taking has potential risks that outweigh whatever the point of them is and that not doing ’em is better than doing ’em. But that’s a personal choice: if I’ve met anyone who’d dob someone else in for possession, they’ve kept quiet about it. Taking a pill is odourless, colourless and smokeless, and while snorting a line of coke can pollute your immediate environment by suddenly introducing an obnoxious pratt into the carbon cycle it doesn’t normally leave your friends smelling like a Bolivian peasant’s armpit. Not those who didn’t start the evening that way, anyhow. It just doesn’t provoke the moralistic firepower of smoking in the wrong place…

    One side effect of the gradual expulsion of smoking from social spaces is a much greater awareness of how smelly it is. If you’re somewhere where smoking is not allowed, even the slightest whiff from afar stands out. I still don’t notice it after about five minutes in a smoky pub, but even that’s wearing off given the time spent in non-smoking pubs (there’s one close to work that’s a bit of an editorial local, and there’s Scotland and the US).

    R

  7. Louise says:

    The No Smoking ban up here in Scotland is pretty draconian. Our office instantly sported a sign – not only was smoking forbidden but it was an offence even to allow someone else to smoke in the building. There’s no doubt about the moralising. Nanny most sternly disapproves. You must smoke in miserable conditions and not enjoy it. Outside the pubs, sad little sodden coteries of smokers huddle under the odd beer-garden umbrella. You do not want to brave the Scottish elements in spring with only a beer garden umbrella for cover. I was starting to feel sorry for the smokers until I came down to England and was reminded what it was like having smelly fag-smoke in every pub and restaurant. So although I can’t stand the Scottish Executive and the whole health-fascist thing, I’m guiltily grateful for smoke-free cafes, pubs and restaurants. I’ve been putting up with it bothering my contact lenses and getting up my nose and stinking up my clothes for years and it’s grand to get rid of it. However if smokers want to invent a system which keeps their smoke exclusively for their own enjoyment, I will heartily endorse their right to smoke themselves silly in any public place.

  8. acb says:

    Louise – I know that smoking bans are nicer for non-smokers. There is some kind of tipping point, too, where the smoke in smoking areas becomes so concentrated that it is really unpleasant. But nicer or more comfortable is not the same as healthier.

    I actually like the smell of passive smoke, perhaps because I had a nanny ( think) about whom I can remember nothing except that she wore soft (mohair?) sweaters that smelled of cigarette smoke and had an an ample and comforting bosom. But it is largely central European tobacco that has this effect on me. The smell of old smoke in England is pretty repulsive.

    Must now go over the Gdn site and see what has happened to these reflections there.

  9. SRW says:

    “There is some kind of tipping point, too, where the smoke in smoking areas becomes so concentrated that it is really unpleasant. But nicer or more comfortable is not the same as healthier.”

    For me, a never-have-smoked, that tipping point is at the moment someone lights up. Yes, literally. Even walking down the street. I’d guess many of my fellow (smug?) never-have-smokeds would say the same thing, but are too polite to mention it regularly. So why shouldn’t we expect the smoker to be less of an arsehole and go somewhere else?

  10. Louise says:

    I’m not making claims about whether it’s healthy or not – that’s the Scottish Executive whom I regard with suspicion when they start making these sort of noises. Next they’ll be coming for my chips and Irn Bru. But SRW is quite right, you only need one smoker to light up for it to be unpleasant. Setting fire to things does not, on the whole, produce pleasant smells unless you have an incense habit.

  11. Jakob says:

    Is passive smoking bogus medically? A quick search on PubMed for ‘passive smoking’ brings up 350+ hits; most of these are about the dangers of passive smoking.

    But quite apart from that, me not smoking does not bother a smoker, but when they light up they make the environment terribly uncomfortable for me. I don’t care if smokers wish to fumigate themselves in private, as long as I don’t have to deal with the smoke.

  12. daniel says:

    mr hoe(my granfather)was told by the staf at doncaster to use the stair well at doncaster royal infirmary for smoking he was hard of hiring so was not inform properly told of the risks so dont post this up on the internet if you dont know the full facts

  13. Tim says:

    In remarks to ACB’s comment is it not your choice to enter into these public places? No one forced you to go into these places by any means so dont go if you dont want to smell like smoke!!!

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