I think making smoking illegal is a fine answer to it all. I would like a law to protect me from having to breathe in smoke. In my own home, I can kick my husband out of the house, in someone elses home, I can just leave....however, there are times when you have to be out in public, and someone is smoking. Sure, I can avoid the person, but usually, by the time I know their smoking, I've already breathed some smoke in. I'd have the preference of not having to breathe ANY of it in.

I disagree with the spanking law. I don't believe spanking is child abuse.
Unfortunately, REAL child abusers and a paranoid people have skewered society's judgment on what is deemed to be traumatic.

BUT, it's irrelevant as second hand smoke is very harmful. There is no grey area with this particular issue as you're attempting to exemplify.

*Agrees with Bingo*

So if a parent is drunk and incapable and putting their child's health at risk as a consequence of this then the police, social services should have no right to get involved as you're in your own home?

Basically you agree with the whole principle and reasoning behind the law you just don't want it enforced? Are you a smoker by any chance?

How about we make a law against adult stupidity...wait, no, then our jails would be overrun by stupid people in a matter of an hour..lol.

This is like saying fining people for breaking speed limits in their cars is not the answer, making driving illegal is the answer.

It's not about the base action itself (be it smoking or driving), it's about doing the action in a way that endangers others.

Alright, I grew up with a father that smoked 3 packs a day. When in the car with him, often on three hour trips, he smoked almost nonstop.

We three kids would sometimes cough and ask him to roll down the window, and he'd open it just enough to get his cigarettes near the window so the smoke from it, would go out the window.

Now all adults, none of us siblings have lung problems, of any kind. We did not have a choice though, Kero. We could b***h, but he could say shut up, or reach around and smack our legs when he had enough, but he never stopped smoking in the car, nor the house, nor in front of us.

Hell, my grandfather would play a game, where he'd hold up a fist in front of us, palm up, and say if we could open it, we got what was inside his fist. It was occasionally a penny, but more often than not, he'd take a draw on his ever present cigar, and blow the foul smoke into our face just as we pried his hand open.


That being said, I think they should also outlaw Happy Meals in the car, while they are at it. That s**t you are feeding your little ones, is going to do more overall long term damage than second hand smoke ever will.

Next up, stereo music above a certain decibel, crappy fruit drinks, headphones, and untinted windows. Do you see the slippery slope?

Finally, the percentage of people smoking has gone way done in the last 30 years or so, yet asthma and other ailments have increased in children. Why is that?

You keep comparing smoking to drinking, they are not even close to the same.
One impairs you the other doesn't.

Are you choosing to not see what I am saying?

No, I am not a smoker.

That is the result of air pollution from cars, factories, etc etc etc etc. Crappy as it is.

We'll never truly know what clean air is as our ancestors did.

Go back, read your comments and then read mine, again. I'm not repeating myself over and over again.

Exactly how I feel too.

I'm done, but just as a final remark, it isn't about the smoking, it's about the liberties.

It's not about comparing the effects smoke and alcohol has to your nervous system, it's about the consequences either action has on people who have no choice in the situation.

Legality of smoking by itself has zero meaning for the conversation. Just like legality of driving, swinging a hammer, drinking, singing, doing math homework or knitting socks are irrelevant by themselves. If you do any of those actions in a way that is harmful to someone else who cannot escape from the harm, it doesn't matter if you're in your home, car, tractor, house boat or treehouse, the rights of the vulnerable individual harmed in the situation trump your rights to do whatever -otherwise legal- actions you want.

No one should have the liberty to cause harm to a child.

Test

I had a lot to say but it seems it won't let me post it for some reason... it just hangs.

Anyways, I disagree with this on the grounds that it is a violation of privacy. You can't say it's "causing harm to a child" because no causal relationship has been established. Only corrolary relationships, and that isn't enough to say "second hand smoke leads to cancer".

Comparing this to things like child molestation is an apples-oranges argument. They are different things.

Go read

Secondhand smoke, also know as environmental tobacco smoke (ETS), is a mixture of the smoke given off by the burning end of a cigarette, pipe or cigar and the smoke exhaled from the lungs of smokers. It is involuntarily inhaled by nonsmokers, lingers in the air hours after cigarettes have been extinguished and can cause or exacerbate a wide range of adverse health effects, including cancer, respiratory infections, and asthma.1

* The current Surgeon General’s Report concluded that scientific evidence indicates that there is no risk-free level of exposure to secondhand smoke. Short exposures to secondhand smoke can cause blood platelets to become stickier, damage the lining of blood vessels, decrease coronary flow velocity reserves, and reduce heart rate variability, potentially increasing the risk of heart attack.2


* Secondhand smoke has been classified by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a known cause of cancer in humans (Group A carcinogen).3


* Secondhand smoke exposure causes disease and premature death in children and adults who do not smoke. Secondhand smoke contains hundreds of chemicals known to be toxic or carcinogenic, including formaldehyde, benzene, vinyl chloride, arsenic ammonia and hydrogen cyanide.4


* Secondhand smoke causes almost 50,000 deaths in adult nonsmokers in the United States each year, including approximately 3,400 from lung cancer and 22,700-69,600 from heart disease.5


* Nonsmokers exposed to secondhand smoke at work are at increased risk for adverse health effects. Levels of secondhand smoke in restaurants and bars were found to be 2 to 5 times higher than in residences with smokers and 2 to 6 times higher than in office workplaces.6


* Workplace productivity was increased and absenteeism was decreased among former smokers compared with current smokers.7


* Twenty-three states - Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, Utah, and Vermont – as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have passed laws prohibiting smoking in almost all public places and workplaces, including restaurants and bars.8


* Secondhand smoke is especially harmful to young children. Secondhand smoke is responsible for between 150,000 and 300,000 lower respiratory tract infections in infants and children under 18 months of age, resulting in between 7,500 and 15,000 hospitalizations each year, and causes 430 sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) deaths in the United States annually.9


* Secondhand smoke exposure may cause buildup of fluid in the middle ear, resulting in 790,000 physician office visits per year.10 Secondhand smoke can also aggravate symptoms in 400,000 to 1,000,000 children with asthma.11


* In the United States, 21 million, or 35 percent of, children live in homes where residents or visitors smoke in the home on a regular basis.12 Approximately 50-75 percent of children in the United States have detectable levels of cotinine, the breakdown product of nicotine in the blood.13


* Research indicates that private research conducted by cigarette company Philip Morris in the 1980s showed that secondhand smoke was highly toxic, yet the company suppressed the finding during the next two decades.14

________________________________________________




Now let me hear anyone whine about invasion of privacy or civil liberties. If you choose to expose your kids to your second-hand smoke then you can't whine about your civil liberties.

"Your right to swing your fist stops at the other guys face"

"Your right to smoke a cigarette stops when the smoke goes into some one else's nose."

Or that's how it should be anyways
In my opinion of course.

Perhaps not complete freedom, but many people seem to think that restriction of freedoms, no matter what reason, is always a negative thing.

It's a knee-jerk reaction.

I agree with all the freedoms an individual can have, as long as their freedoms don't infringe with the freedoms of others. Beyond that, it's an estimate who's freedoms and which freedoms are more valuable. This is the vast gray area lawmakers define. I just don't agree with people defending freedoms for the sake that they're freedoms, no matter how ridiculous. Freedom by itself isn't a good thing.

Then I must have had old information.

For the record I'm not a smoker, don't ever intend to be, and I don't like it when people smoke in the car.

However, I still think this is over-regulation, akin to saying you can't smoke in your own private home. In a public place, yes, I'm all for no-smoking regulations. However, this should have been done in the form of a PSA campaign. You can do many things to your kids that may adversely affect their health. However, the law comes in when it becomes abuse or neglect. If this is abuse or neglect, then buying sugary cereal or potato chips for them is abuse or neglect, because you could be promoting diabetes or making them obese.

Problems happen when the intent is to cause harm, or that you are physically incapable of raising your kids. If you aren't intending to cause harm but you are doing something that may adversely affect their health, yes, it is tragic and I get just as angry at those parents as any other does, but it is the parent's right to raise their kid as they see fit.

Governments doing this is micromanaging. Trying to regulate every minutia of our lives will lead to overcomplicated laws, an over-crowded criminal justice system, and the loss of common sense and free thought. More and more it becomes "what do they say I should do" as opposed to "what do I think I should do".

I think many here agree that the law should be extended to cover private homes too. The argument and the logic is the same, it's the next logical step (and long overdue).

It could and would be the next logical step. But should the initial step have been made in the first place?

If we are concerned about the health effects of smoking, then smoking tobacco should be banned altogether. The only reason we don't is cultural, and tobacco lobbyists. However, it's more harmful than many drugs deemed illegal. I have a big problem with drug laws in my country (the USA). They are horribly inconsistent.

But that's not my concern in this debate. My concern in this debate is the curtailment of the concept of individual freedom. The more and more laws that get cooked up to govern small things that people can actually manage themselves, the more Orwellian society becomes. Sure, you may like the concept of having a society where everyone gets along and no one can hurt anyone else, but at what point do you sacrifice your personal freedoms for this? Soon the police become thought police. Soon the few in government become the ones that decides what's best for all the people, as opposed to the individuals themselves. That is a trend that scares me, yet so many Western, advanced societies are going in that direction.