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Saying this is the first death caused by secondhand smoke is in itself ridiculous. Anti-smoking groups say 3000 people die each year from second hand smoke yet this is the first actually attributed to it.

One of two logical options are possible. Either this really is the first death from second hand smoke or this isn't the first death. If it is the first death, then one death after 200 years of smoking is hardly a public health concern. If it isn't the first death then anti-smoking lobbyists are trying to scare people into accepting the stripping of freedoms by holding up one particular case and saying this is you... when in reality it isn't. Its simply bad statistics and bad science. Any scientist or statistician will tell you one person out of 300 million is an anomoly and not the rule.

In my opinion (and this is just my opinion, not fact) second hand smoke, while it does have negative side effects, is no different from anything else we do. Risk is a part of life. I refuse to live in fear of every little thing that can go wrong. And make no mistake, it is fear that anti-smoking, anti-terrorist, anti-abortion, anti-alcohol, all the anti-something groups are using. If the statistics were hard fact, smoking would be banned by now, same as any other illicit drugs. That being said I do believe that second hand smoke can be detrimental to particular demographs. I don't smoke around children or the elderly (unless they're smoking themselves). Out of courtesy and not concern for public health, I don't smoke in restaurants where people are enjoying a meal. I find those reasonable concessions to make.

For me the real problem is choice. It's something that is being taken away from us with all these laws. I ask, in all seriousness, why not give the business owner this choice? Some places will choose to ban smoking, some won't. Smokers will congregate to the places they can smoke while the non-smokers will go to the smoke-free environments. To me this seems like a reasonable compromise over an issue that has caused so much bad blood between both sides.