Have you ever been in a car with your parents or anyone else who smokes cigarettes? I find myself in this situation often enough between my mother, Debbie, and my girlfriend's mother, Cathie. Every time one of the smokers and I get in the car together there is a conflict that many persistent non-smokers have with smokers. The fight usually starts when a smoker lights a cigarette in the car, or any other enclosed area for that matter. The non-smoker tells the smoker that the cigarette is bothersome and the smoker replies, "but all the smoke goes out the window, look I have it cracked." This is very irritating to a non-smoker because we, I as a non-smoker, know that not all the smoke goes out the window, and what doesn't go out the window goes in the our mouths and gives us problems. "A survey in South Australia found that nearly two thirds of smokers with children under 15 allowed smoking in their car" (www.quit.org). This is something that children of a younger age cannot address, so it is left up to the parent to decide whether or not to continue smoking with children in the car. .
Have you ever wondered exactly what this smoking is doing to both the smokers and the non-smokers? This is a query that has disturbed me for years. I have found that there are many diseases that occur in both smokers and non-smokers. There are also many other effects; some positive and some negative that goes along with smoking and the inhalation of secondhand smoke. Smoking is one of the leading causes of death among Americans. Smoking causes more deaths than AIDS, murder, suicide, fires, alcohol and illegal drugs combine (www.thetruth.com). You may have heard that smoking causes cancer, but there are many more effects of smoking than just cancer that people are just not educated about.
The biggest problem of smoking is that fact that people have a limited knowledge of smoking. In fact, in 1983, one-quarter of the smoking population did not believe that smoking caused illness.
