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Dickens’ Bill to Ban Smoking Near Hospitals
PUBLISHED DECEMBER 3, 2007
City Councilwoman Inez Dickens, D-Morningside Heights and Harlem, has introduced a bill to ban smoking within 25 feet of city hospital entrances.
The ban was initially suggested by doctors and administrators at Harlem Hospital on Lenox Avenue, according to Dickens’ legislative liason Matthew Bitts. The number of residents suffering from asthma is almost five times the national average in the area.
According to its Web site, the hospital’s “Asthma Prevention Project is researching the causes and solutions to this health problem.”
“The bill is about preventive health,” said Lynnette Velasco, a special assistant to Dickens. “The ideal is to create a protective bubble because once you get inside the hospital you are protected, but once you’re outside, you are no longer protected and can be the victim of second-hand smoke. An ounce of protection is worth a pound of cure.”
“It’s a good idea,” St. Luke’s Security Supervisor Alvin Robinsonsaid. “I don’t think it’s going to work. There are already no smoking signs around here and people just ignore them.... They’ve [police officers] got better things to do than fine people for smoking in front of hospitals.”
A part of the Council’s Health Committee, Dickens’ push for preventive health measures stems partially from her own experience as a former smoker, according to Velasco.
But some say that the ban is unfair to smokers. “They talk about their rights because they are not smokers,” said Michael Wright, who was smoking outside St. Luke’s where he was visiting relatives. “What about my rights? I don’t see a wall of smoke here ... Asthma patients would have to walk past me even if I was on the next block.”
According to Bitts, the first steps to recovery and rehabilitation for those undergoing treatment of heart disease and asthma occur outside in hospital green spaces. “Often times people use those green spaces for smoking.”
Having evolved over the past few months, the bill is still in its early stages and lacks an official title. Staff members at Dickens’ office refer to it as the “bubble bill,” Velasco said.
“Everybody smokes,” said Anthony McNeill, who was smoking outside a hospital entrance. “Like in my case, people are coming out here because they are stressed out because their loved ones are ill. You want to take a smoking break and you still need to be close to your loved ones.”
As of now, Dickens has not officially gauged the response of fellow council members or residents of the community.
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Dumb, uneducated idiots. Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death. Your loved ones are in the hospital because they, like you, smoke. Bottom line, you shouldn't smoke, it kills you. Unfortunately, it kills you slowly enough so that you clog up the NHS waiting lists so that we spend time treating you instead of good people with diseases they can do nothing about (unpreventable cancers). Nothing frustrates me more as a surgeon than saving someone's life only to watch them fuck up my op with smoke. I swear I saw a patient smoking through a tracheostomy the other day. I know the dangers of smoke and for helping these people what do I get? I get to walk through this shit on my way to and from work.
Yeah, I'd really like to be operated on by a foul-talking half-wit with a nasty attitude. Hope your health plan includes brain scans and psychiatric help. Dodo.
After Reading the Article about Banning Smoking at Hospital’s, I sit back and wonder why my husband is over there fighting for. It can’t be so we can raise our children the way we were raised to see that things will not be handed to us on a silver platter, But that they must work for things. Cause if you get on your children today to teach them and correct them ( it is called abuse now a days ) just look at the children running the streets now all time of the night and stealing from us while parents cant do a thing about it or the ones getting pregent at 13 ( watch TV, and the news) . Then it was we can’t smoke in Restaurant’s and Bar’s, AND now it's we can’t even smoke OUTSIDE of all things....
If it is the second hand smoke everyone keeps talking about, don’t go outside at all, due to the factories smoke that pollute the air and the second hand smoke coming from your own car (theses are all second hand smoke too) and if you don’t want to smell the smoke as other state, then don’t go to a Bar to Drink. Because we know that you don’t want to smell the alcohol on other people’s breathe either. So where will this leave us?? That’s right. They will soon Bann drinking , working for a living ( factories, and even having a car ) What a great world we have turn this into … Thanks the great people who BUTT there nose’s in other people business and made this world the great country it is today ! (CRAP!) We can only imagine what this world will be when our kids have kids.
Audrey, thanks for putting the cards on the table.
If you're the average Joe with a two digit IQ, a domineering boss at work and domineering wife at home, you're a sitting duck for tobacco nazis' deceit and leap to make a sport of harassing smokers. We smokers need to organize and not just refuse to obey these idiots, but kick their you know whats.
Not conceding that indoor smoking has been irrefutably proven to cause life-threatening harm to non-smokers, I argue that there is absolutely positively NO evidence that ambient and transient cigarette smoke outdoors -- or that which is hysterically claimed, to bolster the argument, to "enter" through the doorways while dismissing the cold hard scientific fact that the dose makes the poison -- is harmful to anyone. Propagandizing that a cigarette smoked outdoors is immune to the law of physics while cars idle at the curb but are of no equal concern is laughable. Unfortunately, the public that hate smoking/smokers will be happy to cling to such stupidity if it fulfills their personal preference.
This is no longer a matter of "Public HEALTH." It's Public HATE. And the intolerants have set their sights on targeting the only politically correct group it's okay -- encouraged by govt. yet -- to hate.
In the face of actions that are no longer reasonable and constitute nothing but sheer persecution, NYC C.L.A.S.H. -- which has resisted until now -- has taken a new position in regard to these unwarranted outdoor bans. That is to recommend non-compliance. To overcome tyranny you do not submit, you defy.
Remember the days when the whining plea to smokers was "Can't you just go OUTSIDE?" Well, we're outside. And now you want that too. Enough.
Audrey Silk
Founder, NYC C.L.A.S.H. (Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harassment)
Brooklyn, NY
Our Mutual Friend, Ms. Dickens, might fall on Hard Times trying to push this one through. People smoking while listening to Tom Jones on their iPods outside that Bleak House, within which are their loved ones undergoing The Battle of Life need a break. Though Ms. Dickens may have Great Expectations of getting this new law passed, the outcome may well turn out to be Micawber.
This is a good bill. Outdoor smoking isn't the problem. Smoking near the entrance is a pain because the smoke usually is blown into the buildings by the wind. Once inside there is no outside air to dilute the smoke.
Secondhand smoke in the breezy outdoors is so dilute it can't be measured and is a minuscule part of the air pollution that everyone breathes without harm.The fascists who want to ban outdoor smoking are doing so because they can. Smokers, disobey!
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