Smoking

[weebarra]

I'm 36 and have been being treated for breast cancer for the past 9 months. I was diagnosed when DC3 was 8 weeks.
I've had 6 months of chemo, a bilateral mastectomy and now I'm doing the radiotherapy bit. AIBU not to want to walk through clouds of smoke at the entrance to the oncology centre?
I get that people are addicted. I've smoked myself and both parents do. It's just that I feel really pissed off when I see both staff and patients puffing away.
I was going to get cancer anyway - I have the BRCA2 gene, but these people don't have to get it. I just want to shake them.

Arrgh these comparisons are so annoying!

Imagine another thread.

"Aibu to be annoyed someone hit me?"

"Well, you have the right not to be hit, but people get murdered, why aren't you screaming about the right not to be murdered"

It is illogical to try and attack someone's dislike of one thing by bringing up another thing they aren't discussing.

I have never vomited from a car exhaust. The smell doesn't cling to my clothes and baby equipment. I don't feel like I'm walking through 20 puffing exhasts when I enter the hospital. If I did, I might mention it.

As it is, we are discussing smoking.

Had the same experience yesterday whilst visiting the maternity unit. Pregnant women, women in labour. Geez people this isn't the place to stand and smoke, especially when you are one of the two groups previously mentioned, let alone creating a cloud of gross for expectant mums and newborns to fight their way through!
My mum is a heavy smoker and I HATE IT. Its her choice to smoke, but I don't want to breathe it in & I don't see why I should.
Move aside!!!

How do you know what my line of work is grumpy? I was being sarcastic when I asked if she had heard of pollution

Right, so here's the situation:

• two thirds of smokers become addicted as children - to a drug which is sanctioned by the government and from which the government makes a vast amount of money.

• notions of 'choice' are simply irrelevant when discussing an addiction. Most smokers have tried giving up countless times and have failed. That doesn't mean that they will never succeed, just that so far, they have failed.

• half of long term smokers will die because of their smoking (see above link).

• smoking is a massive social class issue and a massive issue for mental health. Reductions in smoking rates in recent years have been almost entirely achieved in the middle classes.

• hospitals are becoming 'smoke free' and getting rid of smoking shelters. Among the people smoking at the entrance there will be a large proportion of actually quite unwell people who cannot physically walk very far. There will also be a lot of people who are either worried sick about loved ones or who are in the early stages of grief and who are at that moment not the best capable of thinking much beyond their own needs.

How should this issue be dealt with? As far as I can see there are two basic ways we could approach the problem.

• we could continue telling smokers that they are stupid, selfish and smelly and putting the whole blame for this government sanctioned epidemic on individual smokers. We've been doing this for decades. It's worked really well, hasn't it? If this was a good way of stopping people smoking we'd be seeing much better results by now.

or

• we could treat the people who have ended up as smokers with a little compassion and work towards harm reduction for smokers and non-smokers alike. Put back the smoking shelters and help smokers access them. Champion harm reduction strategies such as ecigs and snus. Place the blame where it belongs - with the tobacco companies and the government which makes an obscene amount of money off the backs of people who became addicted in childhood. Campaign for the total ban of tobacco sales rather than the hypocrytical and cruel system we have at the moment.

YANBU OP to not want to walk through clouds of smoke. Let's find a solution that would actually work.

-----

Side issues:

• combustion engines - these spew out some serious poisons. How would people feel about phasing them out in built up areas - make all new cars hybrids and set a target for no combustion in towns?

• Grumpyrealist - How are cigarettes being made cleaner? ecigs - but you should have seen the nasty shitty posts about ecig users on a recent thread!

• logicalscientist - smokers black lung doesn't exist - that image is probably a coal miner's lung. This does not mean that lung cancer, COPD, heart disease or all the rest of it isn't true, just that that image is baseless propaganda. Funny name you have though

So sorry Helen Sharman...

I love the way this inspace person keeps ignoring all the valid arguments against their.case, and continues to find more inexplicably stupid things to say.

Thank you Plenty. There is a little voice of reason somewhere out there then

But please, Helen, leave the car pollution alone, or start another thread. Smokers.
Doorways.
You agree.
Smokers.
Idiots.
You no agree.
Choosing to smoke is a little bit silly/very blinking batshit mental!
It's terrible that its addictive... but not an unbreakable addiction... or is it?

Logical are you always this rude and unpleasant?

At my hospital, the patients have internal smoking gardens which the public can't easily access.

I know this is unusual, but there aren't inpatients (out patients possibly) smoking outside, so it's mainly visitors to the hospital. Not staff in uniform either.

So even if they are visiting a loved one in decline, I'm sorry, but I refuse to accept that as a valid reason to not walk 25 metres and prevent me and my child from breathing in smoke.

I also don't believe that the visitors to the labour ward, or the pregnant women (always at minimum 3) visiting antenatal have any decent reason to inflict the smoking on me.

Why instead of having compassion for smokers who are choosing WHERE they smoke, have compassion for the people who are having their asthma worsened, or the people who feel like they lost their baby and yet people who put theirs at risk probably won't, or the people who have cancer and have never smoked. It's all a huge kick in the teeth made worse by having other peoples smoke inflicted on you.

So why should the smokers get compassion which non smokers don't? Yes maybe they all started as kids, maybe they are all incapable of stopping. That doesn't change the fact that smoking that fag at that time is a choice they are making which the non smoker has no say in.

Plentyofpube, ecigs are categorically NOT cigarettes!!
A hybrid car IS a car!

Hybrid cars benefit car owners too; they use less fuel.

Logical and grumpy are you now going to call plenty inexplicably stupid?

Due to patient confidentiality I can't post one of the hundreds of cancerous tissues I have dissected, but the pic I used is pretty close. You can argue the toss all you like, if your a smoker your organs will still end.up on my table. After you cut up a pregnant mother with cancer you tend to lose sympathy for those who don't care for others

I didn't start smoking as a child.
I was told it was dirty/dangerous/fatal.
So I didnt start smoking.
Pubes are you suggesting the middle classes are somewhat more educated or possibly, smarter?! Surely that can't be what you're suggesting...

"We could treat the people who have ended up as smokers with a little compassion."

I agree but I must admit, I don't feel hugely compassionate when I'm walking into my local hospital. It has to be give and take. We need to return the smoking shelters and areas in hospitals but people must use them.

Yes grumpy for some people it is an unbreakable addiction. That's why they smoke their way to the grave through cancer, COPD and amputation. It's hardly for fun is it?

When you call smokers 'mental' you probably don't realise just how much you are stigmatising people with MH problems. Please refer to the links provided above. Something like 90% of people diagnosed with schizophrenia are smokers (will dig out exact figures tomorrow if anyone is interested). Recent research suggests that nicotine does in fact lessen psychotic symptoms. Please stop with the 'mental' slurs.

Logical that us emotive bollocks. And it's you're a smoker not your. Maybe you're the one that's inexplicably stupid

You know you're a good debater when....you pick on someone's SPAG.

Autocorrect is a bitch. Thankfully my sentences still make sense

Well when someone has just called me stupid then I like to give as good as I get

No grumpy I am pretty sure it has something to do with wealthier people not having such shit lives, but I haven't studied it enough to come up with any firmer theories than that, I am just aware of the figures.

from the link about black lungs:

“Dr. Duane Carr – Professor of Surgery at the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, said this: “Smoking does not discolor the lung.”

Dr. Victor Buhler, Pathologist at St. Joseph Hospital in Kansas City: “I have examined thousands of lungs both grossly and microscopically. I cannot tell you from exmining a lung whether or not its former host had smoked.”

Dr. Sheldon Sommers, Pathologist and Director of Laboratories at Lenox Hill Hospital, in New York: “…it is not possible grossly or microscopically, or in any other way known to me, to distinguish between the lung of a smoker or a nonsmoker. Blackening of lungs is from carbon particles, and smoking tobacco does not introduce carbon particles into the lung.”

Half of smokers still die, for anyone suffering a crisis of smugness, I am not disputing that

Logical, wow, just wow!
Such powerful insight lost on the smoker enablers. Such a shame.
Inspace don't be fooled because pubes can put up a large and insightful post, she/he just called a qualified cellular pathologist (potentially a consultant pathologist) a propagandering liar!!!!!
I am assuming logical to be quite intelligent and unfortunately I have judged you in a similar way but with a wholly different outcome.
Try to change your point of view.

Grumpy pull your tongue out of logical's arse will you

Nice Inspace, nice.