This doesn’t seem to target renters. There are lots of HOAs and condo associations that have prohibited any smoking indoors, too. They don’t care if you own it or rent it, it’s a violation either way. The difference with this ban is the distance requirement, because my community does allow smoking on balconies.
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The government has been enforcing plenty of rules about habitual behavior in public housing and common spaces for decades. Private companies do the same. HOAs and condo associations have also been successful at regulating resident behavior. It’s why the world where everyone smoked everywhere that we see in classic films and TV shows about previous decades no longer exists.
Renters in smoke-free apartment buildings in my area were unable to have that rule enforced because of tenants smoking for medicinal purposes. While searching for an apartment last winter, I saw that complaint a lot. It was in the top three - right after pests and crime. So this ban doesn’t surprise me, because it’s hitting apartment owners in the wallet if people bail on their leases and rent rooms or couch surf instead.
If people who smoke live in a place with rules about where they can smoke, either they follow those rules or take the consequences. This doesn’t just affect the poor who smoke. It also affects the poor who don’t smoke, because it is costly and difficult to avoid second-hand smoke. As was pointed out above, multi-unit dwellings includes townhomes, co-ops, and condos. So this affects homeowners, too, who also have to follow the rules or pay fines, deal with liens, and possibly face foreclosure.
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I’ve never taken cannabis in any form (the smell of burning marijuana is enough to make me somewhere between queasy and actually nauseous so I don’t want to even consider what taking an edible or something like that would do to me) which means I’m unfamiliar with the differences between delivery methods. Is vaporizing better for pain management than ingesting it orally?
I would not be so adamant except for the fact that it is legally impossible already to simply go outside and smoke away from others, so the very act is illegal EVERYWHERE where this is happening.
That’s kind of the point!
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I am always on the lookout for intelligent people to help me understand the evidence against second hand smoke. Perhaps you can help. I still have yet to find any study showing health damage from typical secondhand situations. For instance, person smoking on their balcony wafting into a neighbors unit. Smoking in a public park. Smoking at nearby tables in outdoor restaurant seating. Smoke from one unit going into a hallway then into another unit. Could you point me toward studies quantifying harm in these situations?
The closest I have seen indoors were studies about people who spend most of their time in the same enclosed room as smokers. Or in the case of outdoor smoking I found a study that showed carcinogenic particulate from a burning cigarette a foot away to be comparable to breathing the same distance from a running car tailpipe. Which nobody ever does. But that kind of thing does not address the concerns that are being legislated with outdoor or nextdoor situations. That was 5-10 years ago so perhaps there is new info?
I would argue that Marijuana can also be medically used without smoking.
The big problem I see with Medical Marijuana is the poor evidence (what it helps with and how much you need) we have as a direct result of it’s classification from the “war on drugs”. If researchers were properly allowed to study it (and other currently restricted drugs) we could have well developed treatments with only the right active ingredients at the right concentrations without the added harms from smoking etc…
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Health advocates get criticised no matter what they do.
If they implement measures to discourage smoking, they get accused of infringing the rights of smokers, who are disproportionately poor people. That is, they’re accused of not caring about the rights of poor people.
If they don’t implement measures to discourage smoking, they get accused of not caring about the lives of smokers, who are disproportionately poor people. That is, their accused of leaving poor people to die from smoking.
If they implement measures to discourage use of cocaine, they’re accused of only trying to save the lives of rich people, who are the major users of cocaine.
If they don’t implement measures to discourage use of cocaine, they’re accused of letting the rich get away with freely using their drug of choice.
It seems to me that you’d need a pretty thick skin to work in public health policy. I don’t think I could cope with the constant criticism, and I am in awe of those who do take on the job.
True, but we can make some educate guesses based on existing knowledge. We know that lead is not A Good Thing to have inside our bodies. So if we discover that alleged brand name vaping devices are actually knock-offs produced in third world countries and that the heating units in those devices have been soldered into place with lead-based solder, so that those using the device are inhaling lead fumes, well, we could probably suggest with a reasonable degree of confidence that this is not A Good Thing. We don’t yet have data showing vapers have more trouble with controlling violent behaviour, but the correlation between the years in which countries eliminate leaded car fuel and reduction in violent crime rates is enough to suggest concern.
True, and your care with plurals and absence of capitalisation is greatly appreciated.
And have presumably been causing lung cancer for millennia, though the link doesn’t seem to have been understood before the 20th century. And where cannabis has been grown illegally, gods know what pesticides and fungicides are present on the leaves.
I’m not following your argument. The risk doesn’t just depend on the number of different dangerous ingredients. The quantity matters. Isn’t one of the selling points of vaping that it greatly increases the number of hot oil globules inhaled? So you might avoid melting the fine lung tissue from contact with tiny burning particles of organic matter, but you increase the number melted by contact with tiny globules of close-to-boiling oil.
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Don’t feed the HOA.
As an outsider this seemed to me very like one of the horror stories of HOA I’ve read.
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I’m about a year out of the literature as I moved on to studying developmental delay, but I’ll query some colleagues who are actively working on smoking linked lung disease and get back to you with any good review articles recently written.
In the meantime some helpful terms to consider when searching the literature are:
smokers are typically referred to as ever, never or current. Interestingly ever and never smokers have molecular differences. there are both reversible and irreversible epigenetic and genetic changes associated with smoking cessation.
a lot of studies will be epidemiological studies of children and workers In various industries. The citation section of this review has some great sources https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7246681/#__ffn_sectitle
pack years is the standard exposure measure in smoking research and relates to the total cigarette exposure (1 pack year = 1 pack a day for a year). this is relevant to second hand smoke as 1 pack year could be 1 pack a day for 1 year or 1/4 pack a day for 4 years etc… it’s basically an estimate of the total number of cigarettes. Also consider that second hand smoke while diluted is also unfiltered and that is a factor.
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I should clarify that I am on the evidence suggests we cannot responsibly claim vaping is safe in any form side. There is a large body of evidence around inhaled compounds, and none of it is great for your lungs.
I wish more people understood that they are more likely to develop COPD than lung cancer from smoking. Chronic diseases that develop late in life, from repeated exposure, are less attention grabbing than things like cancer or popcorn lung and take far longer to study properly (we need old lifelong vapers to accurately calculate risk). COPD is a horrible disease and should be a more substantial deterrent than cancer IMHO.
(Apologies for my spelling my fingers are too fat for my new phone keyboard)
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Same here. The worst part of lockdown for me has been being within ten steps of being able to smoke during the working day, instead of ten floors.
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I’m glad people are willing to work in public health. I’m still going to criticize politicians when in my estimation they’ve erred. I’d probably counsel anyone who wants to please everyone to stay far away from politics.
Tips hat.
My point however was to distinguish them from the relatively recent invention of cartridge vaporizes.
That’s a valid question. And as a career scientist I’m all in favor of the kind of medical research that decades of the racist war on drugs has prevented.
Many currently available dry vapes, including the one I use, allow you to set a temperature curve over a set period of time. Setting it higher can result in a more intense acute psychoactive response. But for those who use it primarily as an evening relaxant, a lower temperature and shorter period can be programmed. That granularity of control is another reason I prefer it to combustion.
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Thanks for the response. I scanned through the 191 citations in that article but didn’t see any that focus on quantifying exposure or danger in outdoor or nextdoor situations.
The closest thing I saw was a statement from the surgeon general that there is no safe level of exposure. But that doesn’t really quantify anything. Given that everyone who doesn’t live in a clean room has had some level of exposure, it doesn’t really help any more than the ubiquitous California prop 65 warnings on most all businesses.
Thanks in advance if your colleagues have such info.
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“I like to think of fire held in a man’s hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind–and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.”
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Well it a good thing that they finally made cooking meth in an apartment illegal, now no one will do it.
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Especial fun: opening up a computer belonging to a smoker. My sister was wondering why her laptop was throttling horribly and the fan was always on. I opened it up, and it was absolutely choked with tobacco-coated dust particles. Her laptop ran a lot better after cleaning out the crap.
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These lines of argument always come up on topics like this, and I don’t understand why. People try it from two angles:
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“Laws have to be 100% enforced or they are useless”. This is clearly untrue. Most laws are weakly enforced at best. Burglary isn’t enforced per se, we just investigate and prosecute it when it is reported. Sure, we have police patrols, but if you think any amount of burglary is actually caught in progress, you watch too many movies.
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“Laws don’t change human behavior”. Of course they do, even when unenforced. Laws are how civilizations declare what they consider to be socially acceptable behavior, and most people want to go along with what their society wants. It’s why we can have societies at all- because most of us follow most of the rules. Not all people stop doing Thing X when you ban it, but many people do, and the world gets a little better (assuming it’s a good and reasonable law, which is a separate question that I am not speaking to here).
I encourage people to take a more nuanced view and let go of these black and white ideas (pardon the pun) of how laws and enforcement work.
If you want to talk about Prohibition and how that didn’t work, that’s a whole other topic that involves inelastic demand, pre-Depression economics, social conditions that lead to the rise of organized crime, and other things that people write entire books about. I’m not saying banning things is good or bad- I’m saying the above arguments about enforceable laws are fallacious.
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I don’t think this is the case, but the consistency is an issue. You make a good point about burglary, and I could make a similar but contradictory point about traffic laws. A cute white girl gets pulled over drunk driving and gets off with a warning (happened to my sister multiple times, engendering a life of criminal behavior assuming there would be no consequences). A black man gets pulled over drunk driving and gets thrown in jail.
I see people blow through red lights around here every time I leave the house, often in front of cops, but only ever see “questionable” people get pulled over for it.
I don’t think it’s a black or white thing, but when laws are selectively enforced, it’s usually to the detriment of poor and other marginalized populations. Aside from a complete overhaul of police culture, I’m not sure what to do about it, though. Hence my dream of cleaning up the law books.
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Oh absolutely it is- laws are universally enforced in racist ways, but that’s moving the goalposts on what I said.
My only goal in that post is to get people to let go of the idea that “enforceability” is a primary consideration when making laws. It’s less important than people seem to want it to be.
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Are you saying there’s a law against smoking outside? Where?
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