Your in the driver seat with your three and four year old in the back seat of your car. You get a odd craving for something. You can't figure out what it is. You stop at a convince store, looking from the corner of your eye, you see a man smoking. You automatically reach for and pull out a cigarette.
Forgetting about your children in the back, you light it up and blow a smoke ring into the air.
Studies suggest second-hand smoke in motor vehicles can be up to twenty seven times more harmful than in a smoker’s home. If your asking for my opinion, I honestly believe that smoking in a car with children or teens in the car with you is wrong. I know how it feels to feel like your smothering from the smoke because my mom and step-father smoke. As of January 1 2010, smoking with children in the car was banned.
A tobacco advisory group from a college has made a report that smoking with children in the vehicle has caused more than 165,000 new episodes of disease in children, and admitted into the hospital were 9,500 children. If we let this keep going the way then the diseases are going to eventually kill our kids. This means that their generation will not survive.
There have been almost forty sudden infant deaths each year and two hundred cases of bacterial meningitis which were the consequences of the smoke inhalation. If we let the children sit in the vehicle while we smoke then we are losing forty of our children and we are causing two hundred of our children to develop bacterial meningitis, which is a serious infection of fluid in the spinal cord and the fluid that surrounds the brain. If this infects our children then we are losing two hundred children of their generation.
When you smoke in the car with children or a passenger and you are caught, you will have to pay a fine of up to $250. In the state of California, if you are caught smoking with a passenger seventeen or younger, you will be fined $100. Bangor, Maine, introduced a $50 fine for drivers or passengers who smoke with a person younger than 18 in the vehicle. Smoking in vehicles used for work or by the public, such as buses or cabs, is banned in some areas. In Alberta, you are not allowed to smoke near a work or business building. British Columbia has a similar rule.
Alberta made a rule that stated "In Alberta, smoking has not been permitted since 2006 in homes where children in foster care are housed." Some American states, such as Maine and Washington State, have also banned smoking in foster care houses. If you work in a nursing home, you are not aloud to have the smell or cigarettes on you. If you are caught with cigarettes or the smell of smoke, you will be asked to leave the area.
Critics of a smoking ban in personal cars argue it is an invasion of privacy that could lead to regulating people’s tobacco usage in their own homes. Similarly, a New South Wales legislator in 1999 predicted a ban on smoking in a car with someone under the age of 18.
In conclusion, smoking is a terrible habit anyway but if you smoke around your children, how are you suppose to show them that smoking is wrong? How do you show them that "mommy is going to quit" when you just pull out a cigarette? What if your child died of lung cancer when he or she was 18 or 19. How much would the cigarette help then?
Originally POSTED BY KYLA DAWN