My smoking gun

We rent our apartment in NYC for all our arms and a few of our legs. For what we’re paying we could easily buy about 8 foreclosed houses in Vegas or a condo in Orlando.

But living in the greatest city in the world comes at a price, that’s just how it is.
Increasingly however, this A4 size price-tag has become unbearably hard to bear. The reason: Smokers.

Smokers surround us. All their stinky, smelly, hazardous, harmful fumes come directly into our apartment. It seeps in through the vents, light fixtures, windows and air-conditioning. The smell is nearly always detectable. Now I’m a reasonable person. I understand that a smoker has an addiction. I understand it’s hard to resist a man in cowboy boots, on a horse, telling them how good they look with a cigarette in hand. I know it’s a struggle for them quit.

Thing is, I’m not trying to make these air-polluters quit. I don’t care how much poisonous tar and chemicals they inhale into their own lungs. Maybe one day they can get sick enough to get one of those nifty devices you press on your neck to talk. They’re perfect for Darth Vader impersonations. They’d be the hit of any Star Wars convention. I’d invite them over to Halloween.

What I vehemently, ferociously, frantically, vein-popping-out-of-the-side-of-my-head angrily object to, is having to inhale their smoke. I don’t fart in their lounge. I don’t drop rotten eggs in their bedroom. I don’t empty my garbage onto their balcony (although at times that is tempting). But they seem to have no problem doing it to me. And more frighteningly to my children.

Of course we’ve brought this up with our neighbors. And of course, because they’re addicts, they don’t get it. They’re fighting so hard for their right to kill themselves, that in their foggy, smoky, cigar-ridden, selfish haze they’re unconcerned that they’re harming us too.

We do actually have a clause in our lease. Lucky us. Our lease says the following: Smoking is strictly prohibited in all parts of the building (other than within a tenant’s apartment) In no event, however shall a tenant permit anyone to smoke within it’s apartment if….. (B) any smoke or odor from the tenant’s apartment is detectable anywhere outside of such a tenant’s apartment.

Of course Management couldn’t give a lab rat’s nicotine injected, cancer ass.
Management has basically offered for us to move. In other words they are kicking us out, not the smokers. I would laugh at this if laughing didn’t aggravate my newly acquired smokers cough.

So what’s a nice, tax-paying, law-abiding couple to do to protect the health of themselves and their kids? I guess we’ll have to sue. Or move. Or both. And that will cost at least a mansion in Detroit.


For those who are interested here are some interesting facts:

Second-hand smoke (which is sometimes called environmental tobacco smoke or ETS) contains toxic substances, over 40 of which cause cancer. Some of these substances are in stronger concentrations in second-hand smoke than they are in the smoke that goes directly into smokers’ lungs.

ETS is causally linked with a number of adverse health effects in children (under 18), including:

* lower respiratory tract infections (i.e. croup, bronchitis and pneumonia)
* Increased fluid in the middle ear
* upper respiratory tract irritation
* reduced lung function
* additional episodes of asthma
* increased severity of asthmatic symptoms in children
* reduced oxygen flow to tissues, comparable to children with anemia, cyanotic heart disease or chronic lung disease †

ETS is also associated with:

* Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)
* acute middle ear infections (otitis media)
* tonsillectomy
* meningococcal infections
* cancers and leukemias in childhood
* slower growth
* adverse neurobehavioural effects
* upper respiratory tract infections (colds and sore throats)
* unfavorable cholesterol levels and initiation of atherosclerosis (heart disease) †