Smoke-free workplaces and public businesses weren’t always the order of the day. Depending on your age, you likely remember smoker break-rooms or even people lighting up at their desks. But in recent decades, that all began to change. With the knowledge of just how harmful the chemical clouds of second-hand smoke are, workplace smoking rules began to change. In 2007, smoke-free workplaces became the norm.
Researchers used the year 2007 to find that instituting smoke-free areas actually does save lives and keeps people healthier than before.
As reported by MedicalNewsToday.com, the study was initially published in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Researchers with the Mayo Clinic of Rochester found that the smoke-free workplace laws were associated with a significant drop in the incidence of myocardial infarction in Olmstead County, Minnesota.
“We report a substantial decline in the incidence of MI from 18 months before the smoke-free restaurant law was implemented to 18 months after the comprehensive smoke-free workplace law was implemented five years later.”
Compared with the 18 months before smoke-free workplace laws were instated, heart attack incidence fell by 33 percent from 150.8 per 100,000 people to 100.7. Sudden cardiovascular death fell by 17 percent.
While the risks of secondhand smoke and the health effects of smoking were long suspected, there was no official government position on the matter until 2006 when then-Surgeon General Richard Carmona said that it may be harming the health of nonsmokers.
If cigarettes were tobacco and nothing else, we may be having a slightly different discussion. But considering the chemical additives added to the tobacco, is it any wonder that their chemical plumes have deadly effects on anyone in the near vicinity? According to the CDC, more than 7,000 chemicals are found in tobacco and tobacco smoke – about 70 are known carcinogens.
Harvard scientists found that children who live in smoke-free homes have far less cotinine in their blood—39 percent less to be exact. Cotinine is a chemical formed when nicotine enters the body. It is a marker used to measure nicotine exposure.
But smoke-free workplaces and public places can only help so much. Children who live in homes where smoke is present get few benefits from local smoke-free laws when they are forced to inhale the smoke at home on a daily basis.
Of course the whole issue of “rights” is another discussion.
Smoke-free workplaces are the best thing that ever happened and probably saved me. At offices, restaurants, anywhere and everywhere, I smoked thousands of cigarettes long ago. With the advent of smoke-free (offices in this case), people had to go outside in all kinds of weather and lean against buildings. I recall a huge outcry about "rights." In the meantime, a woman burned her own house down where I live and damaged those around her because she nodded out with a cigarette in her mouth in bed. People had to absorb damage costs and terror from the explosions and fumes, but she quietly walked away waiting for Red Cross and later, to be taken in free. She smoked 3 packs a day, so rights of others don't seem to fly. What is true is that cigarettes cause massive cancer and debilitation–notwithstanding a lifetime of fighting for air and others breathing it in, and look at the stats–7,000 chemicals in tobacco! It's a test of strength to stop but you can actually breathe.
It is likely that one of the MAIN reason why smoke-free areas work is because it protects EX-SMOKERS from being exposed to the smoke which then provokes cravings (ESPECIALLY for those in the beginning stages of the process of quitting) which make it more difficult to quit and more likely to stay hooked or get RE-hooked. As a person who was a non-smoker for 15 years in the U.S. (and who has now relocated to the developing world) I personally can vouch that not regulating the exposure of cigarette smoke to non-smokers greatly increases their chance of falling prey to the addiction again.
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Smoke free areas are best for health especially for the children.