“The administration [of Mayor Bill de Blasio] is planning to select and pay four health-advocacy groups $9,000 apiece to pressure landlords and developers to prohibit smoking in their apartment complexes so neighboring tenants don’t inhale secondhand smoke.” [Carl Campanile/New York Post]
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If they are banned from smoking in their own homes (especially on on ex-post facto basis) after being banned from smoking many places in the open air, NYC smokers could start scheduling smoke-ins on NYC streets during the rush hour. After all, everywhere else has been banned…
Has anyone considered the possibility that the real purpose of this is not to make a genuine attempt to ban smoking, but to “select and pay four health-advocacy groups $9,000 apiece “?
I believe this is called patronage.
If your apartment’s walls are so porous that second hand smoke can seep through, there should be other safety issues of higher concern – such as the structural soundness of the building and how long the walls would retard the spread of a building fire. Such an apartment building sounds like a death trap waiting to make the nightly news.
Wfjag: Structurally sound is not the same as airtight. Most building materials are porous (even concrete), and builders have to be careful when using non-porous materials that can create an airtight barrier – if it is configured wrong, it creates a trap for condensation that will rot wood and rust steel.
The main fire barrier is usually drywall, which is preformed sheets of plaster of paris. (Old buildings may have plaster and lath instead.) The plaster absorbs heat and releases water in a fire. It will eventually disintegrate if the fire lasts long enough, but so do concrete, bricks, stone, and steel if the fire department doesn’t get the fire under control soon enough. Drywall will give the tenants on the other side plenty of time to evacuate before either flames or deadly amounts of smoke penetrate, but it will only slow down smoke, not block it. Keep one side of a drywall partition or a partition made with any other common building material filled with cigarette smoke, and in a few days the other side will be filled with the stench.
On a related subject (outdoor bans), some who concede that the second-hand-smoke health issue is seriously overplayed (at least in uncrowded venues), nevertheless dislike litter from cigarette butts. In some parts of Europe they have found a remedy, the “portable ashtray” (Google it).
Anti-litter districts might reasonably require outdoor smokers to carry a portable ashtray. Sellers might require cigarette buyers to show possession of a portable ashtray; if the buyer is without one, they could sell a modest-priced and inconspicuous one along with the cigarettes.