However others would argue that doing this may cost money, may disrupt the set up of a public area for example, splitting up a restaurant into two parts may cause the room to look awkward and less attractive and may even disturb the atmosphere in a public area. I don’t believe that money or effort should be wasted on smokers who could easily smoke elsewhere.
Smoking has been described as:
“The single most important preventable cause of premature death”.
The adverse effects of tobacco smoking totally outnumber those of other atmospheric pollutants. In the European Union, disease attributable to smoking accounts for approximately 15 per cent of all deaths. Clearly we can see that this is a fatal habit and it should be cut down as much as possible. Surely, then, we should ban smoking in public places so the amount of passive smokers will drop.
Some people think that passive smoking is very rare and not very serious but as shown before, 1000 people fall victim to passive smoking every year.
Passive smoking is detrimental to the health of adults and increasingly, children, who, according to recent studies, run a higher risk of developing lung problems. From the data to date, it appears that passive smoking carries a 1.5 relative risk of developing cancer of the lung as compared to non-smokers. To me, this is the strongest statement against public smoking as it shows how harmful smoking really is, even to non-smokers.
Also, smoking may have a distasteful impression on some people. Smoking is considered to be a dirty habit and leaves a smoker’s teeth yellow, and results in their clothes and fingers smelling badly. The smell of smoke may get in people’s hair and clothes when they are in public places which they probably will feel gravely about. On the other hand smokers can easily argue that people that don’t want to smell like smoke should stay away from them which, to me, is a fair point.
Another idea is that some smokers may only be ‘social’ smokers and smoke only whilst others are present or only because other people they are friends with smoke. If smoking is banned in public places then maybe this will stop their friends from smoking and so, subsequently stop them from smoking. This then could result in a lower death toll. Some smokers may disagree with this and say that smoking isn’t socially influential but some people may be peer pressured into smoking and in most cases that is how most people’s smoking experiences began in the first place.
Smoking is just for leisure. There are no medicinal or necessary attributes to smoking. Smoking should be banned in public places because people don’t have to smoke. If people want to smoke they can smoke elsewhere and not where it endangers other people’s health. There are no real advantages and a lot of disadvantages to smoking, so if people need to do it, they should do in private or in their own home.
Smoking is a form of pollution and is the biggest death-causing pollutant in Europe. Voluntary polluting is illegal in quite a few countries so then why can’t the most fatal cause of pollution be banned? Some people could argue and say this isn’t quite the same but I see this as just the same and almost worse as it causes more fatalities.
In conclusion I think the negative aspects of smoking far outweigh the positive. In my opinion the most persuasive of these facts is the death toll of smoking and the results of passive smoking. As stated before smoking is just for leisure and yet is causes so much death, why should people die for other people’s enjoyment? Smoking is unattractive and off-putting and may even cost some public places such as restaurants or shops to loose business. Although smoking may relax people and maybe make some people feel happier, it is a small price to pay for the great loss of life it results in.
