As a ten-day old non-smoker who smoked for a good fifteen years of her life, I think I have the right to share my opinion here about life as a non-smoker and about people who complain about second-hand smoke and how it supposedly kills millions of lives every year.
Here's my experience: I still like the smell of smoke, even though it gives me a light headache when I smell it. Maybe it's because I've avoided all cigarette smoke for ten days, so it hit me harder yesterday than it normally would have. But here's what hit my head even harder today: the smell of gasoline. I remember feeling sick as a kid whenever we stopped at a gas station or drove long-distance. I never felt the headache and nausea so strongly in all the years that I smoked, probably because smoking suppressed my sense of smell and had a settling effect on my stomach. But now that I quit smoking, the smell hit my head like a brick and stirred my heart (to use an Armenian expression). I've been home for a good eight hours now, but I'm still feeling sick from the car ride and the smell of gasoline.
Which leaves me with only one plausible conclusion: if cigarette smoke merely gives me a light headache that fades almost as soon as I move away from it, but gasoline literally paralizes me all day after a slight whiff of it, it can only mean one thing: a whiff of gasoline must be much more harmful than a deep inhalation of smoke from a cigarette.
Which got me thinking.. I happened to catch a recent film on TV the other day (The Life of David Gale (2003)), in which Kate Winslet's character gives her smoking partner a dirty look and tells him that she can still smell his disgusting cigarette, even though he's standing about 500 meters away from her, in the cold and rain. Ironically, just seconds later, we see her step into a car and drive off into a beautifully isolated landscape in Arizona (or was it Texas?--whatever). It got me thinking.. It has become so acceptable and trendy to bash smokers that we are forgetting to point our fingers at the real evildoers, namely, drivers. Apparently it's okay to isolate smokers into tiny cabins where they choke on their own smoke, and it's okay to ban them from just about everywhere, including the streets, but it's not okay to stigmatize and punish guzzlers of gas for their habits.
So.. next time a non-smoking driver or consumer of gasoline (such as people standing at a bus-stop waiting for that gas-guzzling monster) complains in that typically annoying way complaining non-smokers do about second-hand smoke supposedly bothering their precious nostrils and lungs, I will do exactly the same every time they step into their cars or on the bus, recklessly farting out their gasoline into my precious nostrils, lungs, brains, and stomach.
P.S.: I know Domino mentioned something earlier about the hypocrisy of banning cigarettes when cars are still allowed to drive freely on gasoline, but I only really understood what the difference was on a personal level (as opposed to an environmental study) after being reminded of the effects that gasoline has on sober me. And, of course, it is hypocritical, especially coming from a country like the US, where all this "second-hand smoke kills"-propaganda started, when even a two-year-old knows that you'll live longer as a chain smoker in the plains of Mongolia than as a non-smoker in Los Angeles.
Edited by nairi, 22 June 2008 - 09:03 PM.
