Member Since: September 22, 2006
Answers: 205
Last Update: February 1, 2007
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Isn't 1st hand smoking worse than 2nd hand smoking? (link)
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Worse? Its the same smoke. 1st hand smoke is worse in the sense that it goes straight to the users lungs without having to travel far, but what a smoker breathes in isn't any more or less toxic than 2nd hand smoke. in the lungs it is more concentrated before it is exhaled. This same smoke, once in the air isn't 'less' dangerous to 2nd hand smokers on a 1 to 1 basis, though in some cases one could argue that it would be less dangerous if the room is well-ventilated. "Well ventilated" is the operative phrase here.
I hate to tell you this, but filters are a marketing gimmick. Sure, they probably stop SOME particles (like tar) but for the most part they were introduced simply to market cigarettes to a larger number of customers. There were some cigs marketed over 50 years ago (I forget the name) that were marketed specifically to women, had incredibly long filters, and were meant to lead women into thinking they were 'safe' or 'refined'. There have been many studies that have argued that by giving smokers a false sense of safety (because 'filtered are so much better than non-filtered'), those smokers often smoke more, longer, and end up worse off. Filters aren't there to filter; if Big Tobaco was so concerned for smokers, you wouldn't have seen decades and decades of misinformation and lies. If filters had even a marginal affect, the tobacco companies would have pushed for legislation supporting mandatory filters. Why didn't they? Because they knew, the gov't knew, that filters were a smokescreen, and they had such a small affect that they weren't even a plausible roadblock in the fight to ban smoking.
Even if you were to argue that the smoke that if 'filtered' on its way into the smokers lungs is less dangerous than non-filtered (something that I would argue is a marginal improvement at best), most of the smoke that ends up in the air is the smoke that smokers have exhaled, NOT smoke from the ends of the cigarettes. That being said, for the most part 1st and 2nd hand smoke really is the same smoke. The only difference is concentration; smokers get a large concentration no matter how well-ventilated an area is, whereas non-smokers breathing 2nd-hand could be getting either very little 2nd hand (good ventilation) all the way to about the same concentration as the smokers themselves.
Any non-smoker who goes out to a crowded bar/club with poor ventilation knows exactly what I mean. You wake up the next morning feeling like you smoked an entire carton, and you hack up phlegm like someone who has been smoking for years. With little/no ventilation, its like smoking whether you want to or not.
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