Nobody needs to tell us that smoking is a nasty habit that threatens not only your own health but others’, too: the Surgeon General and thousands of advertising campaigns have ensured that you get the message. Whether you choose to adhere to or ignore it is your own choice.
Smokers may have an increasingly hard time finding a place where they can indulge in their vice but their own vehicle is their private space and, for the most part, they can do what they want in it.
At least for the time being: Consumer Reports says that a recent study conducted by British researchers and due to be published at the Tobacco Control journal, found that smoking drivers expose their passengers to high levels of secondhand smoke.
The study examined more than 100 trips made by 17 drivers, only three of which were non-smokers. Of those trips, 34 were smoke-free and interior car pollution averaged nearly 7.4 micrograms per cubic meter (μg/m3).
The United Nations’ World Health Organization (WHO) recommended safe level is 25 μg/m3.
While non-smoking trips were well below that level, interior pollution in trips with smoking drivers averaged a far higher 85 μg/m3.
Moreover, according to the study, peak levels averaged 385 μg/m3 and on one occasion, the readings were off the scales, with 880 μg/m3.
Opening the windows or turning on climate control didn’t improve the situation, as the pollution levels inside the car still exceeded the WHO levels.
In the U.S., several states, including California, Arkansas, Maryland and Louisiana, have already banned, or are considering banning, smoking in private cars.
In those states and others that may follow suit, we can delete the “private” adjective then…
By Andrew Tsaousis
7 Comments:
Shouldn't it be someone's choice to slowly kill themselves? I hate being around smokers and do anything in my power to avoid occupying anything or anywhere they smoke. Just a minute of sitting on smoke-laden fabric leaves you smelling like a cig yourself and wanting to trash whatever you're wearing. I can see this law having positive benefits for children who are subjected to the unfortunate environment of smoking parents, seeing as smoking is one of the most notorious externalities to public health and safety. But still, regulating the inside of an individual's private vehicle? There's something wrong there...
Well said, while smoking is something I do not want to be around, no government has the right to tell you what to do in your private car. Next thing you know, the government will be coming inside your home telling your to put down the Dorritos because your getting too fat!! Government is already too big.
The trouble is, in the UK everyone pays into the National health Service and as a result everyone is paying for the smoker's folly.
I know it can also be said of other self-induced diseases but smoking is a particularly nasty one that affects others. No one dies from passive eating that I know of.
"Everyone is paying for the smoker's folly"? Every UK tax payer pays his share for the NHS and subsequently benefits from it to some degree. The smoker, fully aware of the harm that his addiction inflicts on his health, also pays a very hefty tax in the UK on every pack of cigarettes that he purchases and subsequently smokes.
The UK government, and presumably other governments worldwide, benefit greatly from tobacco-related tax income, which just goes to underline the hypocrisy: they on one hand happily reap the income from tobacco companies and then bemoan the health risks that their products cause. I don't have the figures, but I would presume that these taxes would quite adequately cover the costs of smoking related disease.
Any smoker would agree that it is unreasonable to cause a non-smoker to have to breathe their smoke, and would concede that they should not smoke in the car with non-smoking passengers. But to forbid a sole individual from smoking in the privacy of his own vehicle is an invasion of their civil liberties.
Pretty much how it is here. One smoker dying in hospital is something that everyone pays for as taxpayers.
I think it behoves the government to keep people from becoming harming themselves in self-destructive activties before they (as evident by the massive volume of cancer data from the last 60 years) become something that harms everyone else in the form of higher ratets.
In the US with our mostly private health insurance (which is about to be extended to everyone unless that elitist criminal Romney wins in which case it's back to 1928) everyone still pays for smokers, since whatever the mechanism, costs are sort of shared accross society. If you don't have insurance here and you get lung cancer or emphysema it will be paid for somehow, since a law was passed a couple of decades ago that you can't just let them die in the street. It varies radically from place to place, In New York, it's $12.50 (7.8 pounds), mostly taxes of course.
I once bought a year old car (with 50 thousand miles on it) with a typical slightly fuzzy headliner glued to styrofoam or whatever it is. I steam cleaned it over and over with the upholstery tool, and was dumping buckets of black water for hours. Imagine the driver's lungs.
Smokers not only die younger not requiring pensions or other medical benefits to be paid but also pay far more tax than non smokers, the argument that everyone else is paying for the smokers folly is not accurate.
The amount of tax paid on cigarettes was around 12.1 billion in the UK 2011-12 according to the tobacco manufacturers association, and according to the BBC the cost of treating smoking related diseases in the UK was around 5 billion, that on its own says smokers are actually providing a nice 7 billion in profit, next consider the extra revenue that is gained from non payment of pensions for all the smokers that chopped 12 to 14 years off their lives that's an approx saving of £50k for each smoker that dies 10 years early, billions of extra revenue there is a very good reason the gov have not totally banned smoking and that is the revenue it generates.
That said there probably should be a ban on smoking in cars unless the smoker is in the vehicle on their own not harming anyone else.
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