Just when I thought I couldn't get more disgusted with the anti's I find this thread. I swear I must be a masochist because this is just painful. 3rd hand smoke, really? How are these nuts able to get away with this crap? It's because no one calls them on it. Wonder how they would react if every smoker who lived in these crazy states filed a multimillion dollar lawsuit against the state for libel, slander, pain and suffering and every business owner whose business went bad because of these idiotic bans did the same. I'm not even a smoker and I am sick to death of smokers being pushed around. I don't know what a smoke free state is, but if I had to guess I'd say it's something ridiculous like no indoor or outdoor smoking in public. Where the hell do these people get off? I'm a non-smoker and they sure don't speak in my name. I wouldn't let them near me.

Smokers should start forming their own versions of speakeasies, private homes or clubs where fellow smokers can enjoy a meal and a cigarette in a dignified setting. If these sprung up all over the country, it would be a kind of subcultural support network for smokers. Is there anything out there like that now?

LOL. I can see it though, someone opens one up and advertizes it. Within 2 - 3 weeks is sued.

Crap like this makes me even more determined to show extra respect to smokers. How can people take it seriously when all the evidence points the other way? If smoke was that dangerous, no one would flipping be alive. What aren't they getting? This is what happens when people let "the experts" do their thinking for them.

You have to realize that non-smokers reap a lot of psychological benefits from pinning every known form of cancer on smoking or passive smoking. There is a big psychological pay-off, if you believe that you can avoid all forms of cancer just by not smoking. It is much more anxiety-provoking to think that you will get cancer due to your own genes, which you can do nothing about, or due to pervasive industrial pollutants, which you can also do nothing about.

Even more anxiety-provoking is the thought that cancer might happen to a person by chance, due to random cellular mutations that occur over time no matter how a person behaves or what kind of environment they live in.

There is a huge amount of fear involved in living a mortal human life, and people are always looking for ways to deny or minimize that fear. We can't change the fact that we are mortal, and the certain knowledge that our life will one day end is completely unacceptable. So we grasp at ways to deny the truth. Continued sanity depends on that denial.

Everything becomes more tolerable if you embrace religious beliefs that promise an afterlife. Another good psychological relief mechanism is to blame the existence of death on individual behavior rather than admitting it is built into the human body and ultimately can't be avoided.

That's one good reason why it's almost impossible to get someone to voluntarily give up their beliefs about smoking and illness. Why would anyone want to give up a belief system that tells them they can avoid getting sick and even avoid dying altogether if they avoid one behavior, which they never enjoyed doing anway?

It's all just a recipe for frog soup, you know put a frog into boiling water and he jumps out, but if you slowly bring it to a boil he'll boil to death. We let them whittle away at our rights a little at a time until we stand there with an overpriced pack of smokes and no where to smoke it.