A Rant Against Smokers' Rights

I used to be a smoker, even a very heavy smoker for a few years, but I quit 22 years ago this month and am SO happy I did. What a horrible addiction.

But now I'm unusually sensitive to smoke and avoid it if I can. I don't go places where I know there will be smoke in the air. I don't know if my sensitivity is due to having been a smoker myself, but I've thought it may be. People who have never smoked don't seem to have quite as much trouble with it as I do now.

But whatever the reason, it is very hard on me to be around smoke now. It makes my chest hurt, it stings my eyes, and after some time of exposure it gets up into my sinuses where it causes me to smell smoke for a couple of weeks whether there is any actual smoke in the environment or not. Then it's the smarting eyes and the tight chest that tell me if there is or not.

When I was a smoker I was oblivious to the effects on nonsmokers, as I think most smokers are. It seemed to be mostly a matter of aesthetics, people not liking the smell, rather than anything harmful. You adapt, you go to the smoking section in the restaurant, you smoke on countless front or back porches because the smell of smoke is not wanted in the house, and so on. We heard "scientific" reports of the supposedly harmful effects of second-hand smoke, but such reports have an abstract quality to them. I don't recall anyone complaining that the smoke actually hurt them.

Now I know that it hurts and I know it the hard way, by being trapped in my own apartment with the smoke from neighbors' cigarettes and no right to protest against it. They have the rights. At least in my state they do.

For the first four or five years I lived in this apartment I had the same neighbor to the south of me and he didn't smoke. Then he moved out and there have been half a dozen or so different tenants in that apartment since then, all of them smokers. The management requires them to go outside to smoke because they don't want the apartment walls plastered with the tars and permeated with the smell of smoke. What that means is that the smoke comes into MY apartment next door.

It comes through the window if I have one open, of course, and it comes through the A/C if I have it on. What else do you do on hot summer days but run the A/C and open windows to cool the place down? I can't do that if there is smoke in the air. But it also comes in when everything is shut up. I think that might be because I do have to run a fan since I can't do anything else to keep the place cool, and the fan may suck the smoke in through the cracks around the door and windows. Just a theory.

Mercifully most of the tenants haven't been heavy smokers and were gone most of the time anyway, but while they were smoking it was an unpleasant experience for me. When I once asked the manager if there was anything she could do about it, the answer was no.

Now I have a new neighbor and she's home most of the time and she has friends there with her much of the time and they ALL smoke. And at least one of them is a very heavy smoker. Someone smokes sometimes well into the night so I can't even have a window open during the coolest hours any more.

This is pretty much unbearable. It is the smokers who have the rights, not the victims of the smokers, a very odd injustice. Sure, it's a personal habit but this particular personal habit happens to impact others, very seriously too as I now understand from experience. I'm sitting here with smarting eyes as I write. Tenants are normally protected from other tenants' habits that encroach on them but not from smoking. I did a little research on the rights involved in this sort of situation and it doesn't look good for the nonsmoker. They've got laws against smoking in public places but not in apartments. Apartment managers sometimes try to accommodate people but that doesn't always happen.

I found one case, back in the 90s but as far as I can tell the same attitudes still pretty much prevail -- a man had lived for some time in an upstairs apartment when a very heavy smoker moved into the apartment below him. He would wake up to a cloud of smoke in his bedroom. He got an irritation in his eye from it that required medical treatment. The management said there was nothing they could do about it. When he politely approached the smoker, she agreed to smoke in a different place but that didn't last long. She was aware that she had a "right" to smoke where she did. Finally the management sued HIM for "harassing" the smoker, which merely meant the request that she smoke elsewhere. The court decided against him. He was evicted. Amazing.

I've ordered a carbon-filtered mask from Amazon which should arrive early next week, to wear in my own apartment, because my neighbor has the right to inflict her smoke on me.