Don't pollute my airspace!!

This article is a little old, but its message is still, unfortunately, very current.

It's about how soon inhaling a cigarette smoker's emissions becomes dangerous for a non-smoker's health. Apparently very soon:

Even brief exposure to secondhand smoke in bars and restaurants can result in measurable levels of a toxin in workers’ bodies that is known to cause lung cancer, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.

They found nonsmoking workers in Oregon who worked a single shift in a bar or restaurant that allowed smoking were more likely to have a detectable level of NNK — a carcinogen linked with lung cancer — in their bodies than those who worked in nonsmoking establishments.

“NNK is only found in the body as a result of either smoking or breathing other people’s smoke,” said Michael Stark of the Multnomah County Health Department in Portland, Ore., whose study appears in the American Journal of Public Health.
[...]
“As a group, four out of five of the nonsmokers who worked in a smoking environment had some detectable level of this deadly chemical in their body, and as a group, for every hour that they worked, that level increased by 6 percent,” Stark said in a telephone interview.

Other studies have shown that nonsmokers exposed to secondhand smoke have about a 20 percent higher risk of lung cancer. They are also at a higher risk of asthma and perinatal complications such as sudden infant death syndrome.

“This adds to the very strong and growing body of evidence that second-hand smoke exposure is dangerous and people need to be protected,” Stark said.

A smoker friend of mine from Italy used to argue with me about this topic a lot.

As a non-smoker, I was obviously for making smoking in public places illegal (I was also a waiter at the time, which forced me to breathe other people's smoke for long hours daily). He, on the other hand, would argue that he had the right to smoke and that he didn't like other people trying to take away that right from him. It was, after all, his health, and if he chose to endanger it by smoking, it was his decision, as a free person, to do so.

Naturally, I disagreed with him strongly, and always felt like if he had the right to smoke, I had the right to breathe clear air, free of carcinogens (and that disgusting smell).

We never seemed to agree or change our minds or each other's, but these new scientific discoveries seem to give my argument the upper hand...