by James Kellard

Created on: May 18, 2009   Last Updated: May 19, 2009

Several States in recent years have discussed the possibility of banning smoking in your car. Some considered banning smoking in your car in general or while driving, others only banning it while children are in the car.

The last couple of decades it has become more and more trendy to discourage smoking and in many cases attempting to ostracize smokers. There is no argument anymore as to whether cigarettes are unhealthy or not. They can cause cancer, emphysema, heart attacks, stroke, effect your immune system, are addictive, and on top of all of this have become very expensive.

Despite all of this being common knowledge there are still many people who choose to smoke. Considering the fact that we are, for the most part, a free Country, if a person chooses to continue smoking despite all of the information available, it is not the business of anybody else to tell them they need to quit or try to harass them into quitting.

Many states now have laws banning smoking in bars and restaurants, this seems reasonable. These are enclosed spaces in which people are eating and those who choose not to be around cigarette smoke should not be forced to deal with it. For the same reason it is also logical for smoking to be banned in the work place and other public indoor areas. What is completely unreasonable is to restrict people from smoking in their own homes or cars. It is also unreasonable to restrict someone from smoking in an open outdoor public place but that is a different subject.

Smoking in ones home or car does not effect the public. If someone does not want to be around the smoke they can just avoid entering the car or home. Some of the proposed laws banning smoking in cars would only apply when there is a child in the car. The reasoning being, why should a child be exposed to the cigarette smoke of their parents or other adults in an enclosed space? Granted, most would agree that we should not be smoking around children. Not only should we be concerned with their health but we should avoid any encouragement for them to smoke in the future. Despite all of this, passing a law to ban smoking in cars, even while children are in it, is unreasonable.

This will no doubt be an unpopular position but we have to look at the big picture. Let us say that we begin passing laws to ban smoking in cars while children are in them. Quite a few states already have laws banning cell phone use while driving, New York being one of those states, and how many people follow that

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