Cough...cough....hack.....cough. Sorry about that, it's hard to catch one's breath when one is inundated with smoke no matter where one chooses to walk. I try to walk down Dundas from Richmond to Wellington and I am greeted with the puffs of smoke like great steam engines of the past. I try to enter the library and have to practically hold my breath to get past the crowd of determined smokers who are standing near the entrance to the place. You walk in the doors and continue down the hall only to find that the hallway is acting EXACTLY like a chimney and the smoke is continuing to affect you all the way down to the doors of the library itself.
I finish my errand at the library and then I leave, heading for the nearest bus stop to my home. Hack....choke...cough. More smokers here. The Galleria Mall near either entrance to Teletech is like a smoker's haven.
I have always taught my children to live and let live. I don't try to stomp on the rights of the smoker to pollute their lungs and sentence themselves to hyper-aging and early death. Their addiction is a sad commentary on not only the individual who is smoking but the cigarette companies that have turned a simple smoke of tobacco into a addictive, polluting nightmare.
I do however draw the line at smokers who seem to be neglectful of MY rights. I have asthma, I can't handle the smoke, it makes it twice as hard for me to breathe. I have enough trouble with the cold weather making things difficult, but when someone enjoys their addiction right in front of me, my body just can't take it and I start coughing.
I am not an addict, I don't WANT to be one. Your second-hand smoke gives me no choice. I pull nicotine in with every feeble breath I take. One of the apartments I used to live in, the smoke came in over the attic crawlspace of their house, and right down into mine. My family had temperment problems and the same issues as those who smoke, but we dont' even light up. When the person left the apartment, we suffered the withdrawl of nicotine. Just ask my doctor, its exactly what he said.
Just once I'd like to be able to enter or exit a building and NOT have to breath in the fumes you are blowing out of your mouths and noses. Just once I'd like to be able to wait for a bus without coughing up a lung.
Just once I'd like to open my apartment window and NOT have the smoke rising like a chimney and sliding in through my window. Why do non-smokers have to be afflicted with and punished for having the good sense not to smoke.
I used to say live and let live, but now that you are ruining my life I am not going to say that anymore. I'm going to say....BE CONSIDERATE!!!! Stop smoking where non-smokers might be standing.
Stop smoking where people who are using oxygen are waiting for buses or at least take your addiction down the road a bit so I don't have to breath it in and neither do others.
Of couse you could do yourselves one better....stop smoking altogether. For the sake of yourselves, and for the sake of your children, grandchildren and those who have a hard enough time breathing as it is.
Oh and a message for the cigarette companies and through them and their lobbyists to my government....STOP making these stupid things with enough chemicals in them to pollute a human being for life. Go back to making just PLAIN, ORDINARY, RUN OF THE MILL tobacco stuffed in paper.
I know it might cut into your profits but, the way you are making things right now.....you're cutting into my right to live.
That Galleria entrance near Teletech is HORRIBLE. The smoking there...ugh not to mention the fact that they all throw their cigarette butts on the ground and it makes a disgusting mess.
Today I saw someone smoking one of those cigar cigarettes with the plastic ends on them in a bus shelter. Ick.
A lot of good points in your rant. A plea for 'consideration' from smokers is needed.
Hoping for the same from corporations might bear fruit.
I don't see harm, relatively speaking, in building Smokers' Dens (with ciggie-tax money) in a few appropriate locations, where many seem to congregate, in order to keep smokers out of chimney-like doorways.
The Wort (Roadhouse in Old South) provided a smokers' tent outside one doorway on their patio, keeping the other entrance smoke-free.
That "smoker's den" would be a nice compromise. then they can say no more street smoking and the rest of us, the supposed majority of us, can live our lives in healthful peace.
I agree that the mess at Galleria is disgusting. Have you seen that "pit" outside the parking garage side of the building, where the Trafalgar bus stop is?
One thing I'd like to know is...how far from doorways are they supposed to be? None of the smokers I see seem to be all that far from the door.
