Reply #73: Absolutely.

[jobycom]

There's no such thing as a "whiff" of cigarette smoke. It burns, it hurts, and it's deadly. A person who smokes where another human being can inhale it has no regard for human life. Drunk driving causes 17000 deaths a year, second hand cigarette smoke causes (using lowball estimates) 26000 deaths a year. That's in non-smokers. Some estimates say the number is closer to 70,000. I frankly don't care what smokers do to themselves, but they are dying at over 400,000 a year.

How many baseball bat murders were there last year?

If a major corporation built a plant that spewed the same toxic crap into the air, killing its neighbors, every liberal and a few conservatives would scream for it to be shut down and those responsible prosecuted. But the tobacco industry and corporations spend so much money buying Congresscritters that smokers can hide in denial and argue that it is their "right." THere should be no right to kill other people. Smoking alone--that's cool, you aren't hurting anyone but yourself. But smoking around other people should be illegal. Not every puff of smoke kills someone, obviously, but the cumulative effect of it being impossible to get away from smoke does.