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EDITORIAL: The rights and the wrongs of smoking in public 

While living in the San Fernando Valley in early 2006, I remember thinking how ludicrous it was that the Calabasas City Council had adopted an ordinance that basically eliminated the ability for anyone to smoke in public. The secondhand smoke control ordinance specified that smoking was prohibited in all public places where other persons could be exposed to secondhand smoke, including indoor and outdoor businesses, hotels, parks, apartment common areas, restaurants and bars where people could reasonably be expected to congregate or meet.

At the time, as a half-a-pack-a-day smoker, I felt persecuted and loathed. . . .

After I left the Valley, I moved up north and found myself in a pro-smoking environment. It was widely accepted, if not condoned, as a bridge to meeting new people. But as the butts piled up, I found the habit to be more destructive and bothersome. The initial buzz that everyone gets with the first cigarette wears off as the day progresses. Instead of relaxing and enjoying cigarettes, I was tense and frustrated because my nicotine level wasn't high enough. And as a friend pointed out, it wasn't the nicotine that was making me feel relaxed; it was taking deep breaths throughout the day to deliver more oxygen into my body -- something that was defeated as my lungs sucked up nasty carcinogens.

By December 2007, I decided I'd had enough. . . .

although I am not in favor of the government legislating certain behaviors, the problem is that when you are a smoker, you simply aren't taking into account how you are affecting other people, be it their health, their level of comfort or their children by modeling for them that smoking should be a norm in our society. . . .

because fighting between the smokers and nonsmokers will never cease, cities like Thousand Oaks and Moorpark have decided to follow Calabasas' lead and make it more difficult to expose nonsmokers to the carcinogenic plumes of cigarettes through their own anti-smoking ordinances. . . .

While not every provision of the new laws seems fair, including forbidding smoking in rental homes, it isn't about the person who is committing the act; it is about everyone else who has to be subjected to it. For this reason alone, Moorpark and Thousand Oaks are headed in the right direction toward putting an end to exposing others to a debilitating habit.

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