Anti-smoking rant

As I get older and I get more concerned about my health, I get crankier and less tolerant. I am sick to death with hearing about smokers' rights. I can't walk out of my apartment on any day at any time and go more than a 100 meters without breathing second-hand smoke. I can't walk out of any building on campus during the break between classes without walking through a cloud of smoke because all the smokers go outside and mass around the doors (Thanks, guys. That really helps.). I feel like turning a firehose on them. The 2nd and 3rd floors of the professors' wing in our building stinks of cigarette smoke leaking out of the professors' offices - even though there is a ban on smoking in the building. I've even seen smokers standing inside a building by an open window as though that would really make a difference.

Although I recently read a news article that cited a study claiming that less than 50% of Korean men smoke, I doubt that this is true. I've talked to numerous students about smoking and many say that they don't smoke ("Well, except when I drink or hang around with a bunch of male friends who smoke.") and others who say they don't smoke at all ("4 or 5 cigarettes a day doesn't count, does it?"). I don't think that smokers tell the truth on surveys.

In Korea, this is all fairly recent research.

Age-standardized prevalences of smoking were 74.8% and 2.9% for men and women respectively, with no urban-rural difference. (from a 1992-93 study by Chung MH, Chung KK, Chung CS, Raymond JS School of Public Health, Seoul National University, Korea ).

South Korea has the largest smoking population of all OECD member countries estimated at 12 million out of 47 million in 2004. The smoking penetration in South Korea is fairly high as close to 55% of men are smokers. Women smokers are also not uncommon in these days. (from a Euromonitor study in 2004)

The cost of malignant tumors caused by smoking was $1.86 billion and cardiovascular disease accounted for $1.55 billion. Respiratory disease accounted for the lowest costs at $.51 billion.

Among Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, Korea has the highest percentage of males, ages 15 and over, that are daily smokers (Korea: 69.9 percent, Australia: 21.4 percent, Canada: 20.2 percent, France: 32.0 percent, Japan: 52.0 percent, UK: 28.0 percent, US: 20.2 percent). (from an ISPOR study presented in 2004)

So, it didn't help that I read this in the International Herald Tribune today - Puffing on Polonium.

When the former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko was found to have been poisoned by radioactive polonium 210 last week, there was one group that must have been particularly horrified: the tobacco industry. The industry has been aware at least since the 1960s that cigarettes contain significant levels of polonium.
...
Pack-and-a-half smokers are dosed to the tune of about 300 chest X-rays.

Is it therefore really correct to say, as Britain's Health Protection Agency did this week, that the risk of having been exposed to this substance remains low? That statement might be true for whatever particular supplies were used to poison Litvinenko, but consider also this: London's smokers (and those Londoners exposed to second-hand smoke), taken as a group, probably inhale more polonium 210 on any given day than the former spy ingested with his sushi.
...
The World Health Organization estimates that 10 million people will be dying annually from cigarettes by the year 2020 - a third of these in China. Cigarettes, which claimed about 100 million lives in the 20th century, could claim close to a billion in the present century.

So, to all you smokers out there demanding your smokers's rights, "F*** off."