Number One: A Smoking RANT

Cue theme music: "Goody Two Shoes", Adam Ant

Yesterday, a small group of us went to opening day of Cedar Point (yay roller coasters!). We had a wonderful time, about which I’ll RAVE later, but for one thing. In the longest lines of the park (namely the Millennium Force and the Magnum), I spent half my time coughing uncontrollably. A day later, my lungs feel sore and it is inadvisable for me to breathe deeply. Now, I didn’t have a cough when I arrived and I haven’t picked up any illness, oh no. This cough was completely preventable, because it was due to my allergy to cigarette smoke. What really gets me is that the people who lit up around me did so in complete defiance of the “Smoke-free environment… Failure to comply is a misdemeanor” signs posted every ten feet.

I understand smokers have rights, too. Regardless of my personal opinion of the habit, I accept that Cedar Point allows smoking in the park. That’s fine. When they light up on the midway or on a park bench, I am free to walk away and save myself a coughing fit. I find it mildly annoying to be chased away from places like that, but I’m sure they find it similarly unpleasant to have people wrinkle their noses and veer away from them (assuming they notice at all). But when I am trapped in a corral of S-curves with them for an hour or more, I have no choice but to inhale the stuff that’s going to make me ill.

Cedar Point has attempted to protect me and all other allergy and asthma sufferers by making it not only against the rules but also against the law to smoke in line. Apparently, some people need a personal invitation to behave in a courteous and lawful fashion. How much could it hurt to refrain from smoking for an hour? If you’re so nervous about the roller coaster you need nicotine to calm you down, why not try nicotine gum? (To the couple smoking, drinking beer, and playing lip-lamprey in front of us: you people just need help. As for the kids who line-jumped ahead of us and then lit up, that’s another can of worms.) Anyhow, there’s no reason to make people around you miserable just so you can calm down, look cool, or whatever you’re trying to accomplish by smoking.

Sometimes I wonder what goes through one of these inconsiderate smokers’ minds when they see the reactions they cause. I know I’m not alone in what happens to me; one of my friends has asthma and reacted pretty much the same way I did in line. At the smell of smoke I try to breathe through my sleeve, tissue, or whatever. This works for a few minutes, until the smoke saturates the material. That’s when I start coughing. For a while I can suppress it, but pretty soon fluid begins building up in my lungs and I have trouble breathing. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? So there I am, hacking up a lung, and they go right on smoking. Is this a failure to recognize cause and effect on their part, or do they just not care?

Someday, I’d like to take one of them aside. I’ll find out what smell makes him or her gag. I’ll put it in a few atomizers and pass them out to, oh, five or ten people around him or her in line. Then I’ll have those people start spraying it randomly every couple of minutes. Would that solve the problem? No. But it would make me feel better.

I can hear the protesters now. “It’s a free country!” they exclaim. “We have the right to choose to smoke.” Well, yes, you have the right to choose…until it infringes upon the rights of others. I’d like to believe that I have the right to prevent someone else from making me ill. Enough other people believe similarly that most places now have policies about smoking. No, it’s not persecution of smokers. There’s nothing that says you must quit smoking. It says you may not smoke where others cannot escape you. Is this so difficult to understand?

UPDATE!

The comic strips Bizarro and Non-Sequitur apparently have similar opinions on smoking in general today...