Smoking in public places should be illegal on the grounds of public health and well being. A law to ban smoking in public places could be the single most important contribution to alleviating both lung cancer and heart disease, along with countless other adverse health issues. The Environment Protection Agency has concluded that exposure to secondhand smoke causes approximately 3,000 lung cancer and 35,000 heart related deaths per year in nonsmokers. Secondhand smoke causes premature death and disease in both children and adults who do not smoke. The only way to effectively protect non-smokers from exposure to secondhand smoke is to ban smoking altogether in all public outdoor areas and buildings. Having designated smoking areas, separating smokers from non-smokers, cleaning the air, and ventilating buildings, cannot keep non-smokers from being exposed to secondhand smoke.
Secondhand smoke is involuntarily inhaled by nonsmokers, lingers in the air hours after cigarettes have been extinguished, and can cause, or intensify, a wide range of health effects, including cancer, respiratory infections, emphysema, and asthma. Also known as Environmental Tobacco Smoke (ETS), secondhand smoke is a combination of the fumes given off by the burning end of a cigarette (sidestream smoke) and the smoke exhaled from the lungs of smokers (mainstream smoke); therefore it has twice as much nicotine and tar compared to the smoke that a smoker inhales. Classified as a "known human carcinogen" (cancer-causing agent), it contains hundreds of chemicals known to be toxic, including formaldehyde, benzene, chloride, ammonia, hydrogen cyanide, and countless other deadly chemicals. In addition, secondhand smoke greatly impacts the health of people who aren’t smoking but are inhaling the smoke due to their proximity to one who is.
Many millions of Americans are still exposed to secondhand smoke in their homes and workplaces despite a great deal of progress in the public smoking...