Brian Lee
Until recently, I haven’t had much sympathy for smokers. They didn’t need it anyways because, at one time, just about everybody smoked — my entire family, all the cool kids, even hockey heroes like Guy Lafleur.
And they could smoke anywhere, so they did. Recall the freestanding metal ashtrays that sat in the middle of each row of seats on the old ferries. Or airplanes with ashtrays installed in the seating armrests. Smokers were the ruling class and even if you didn’t smoke, you tolerated them.
But then smoking became socially unacceptable. Smokers were forced out of buildings and on to the street to feed their addiction. The rest of us cheered. Emboldened by the public’s support, authorities then banned smoking in parks and other public areas.
As much as I appreciate clean air, I felt sorry for the miserable things, huddled outside doorways tempting hypothermia for a hit of nicotine. Then they took the doorways away.
We build temples to consume alcohol and safe injection sites for IV drug users but you need an iPhone app to find a place for a smoke break. It seems a bit unfair.
Now, BC Ferries has announced it will ban smoking from ships and terminals entirely. It may be just a bit of pre-emptive hysteria to control the hordes of potheads expected on the upper decks after the legalization of marijuana, but smokers will suffer for it. Whether it works remains to be seen — addicts won’t always obey posted signs when a craving hits.
I can imagine the relief it might be to reach the ferry terminal and hop out of a car full of yelping kids for a butt after a day of driving in the city. And, if you’re a smoker who works on a ferry, do you quit, or just quit?
But each time I start to feel like this — like the war on them has been taken too far — I’ll hear about another dumbass smoker starting a forest fire. In July, BC Wildfire Service estimated that about half of the wildfires reported in BC were human-caused. A good portion of those were from discarded cigarette butts.
If smokers caused even 10 per cent of the fires in BC this year, they have destroyed 86,000 hectares, sent 19 million tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and cost the province $38 million. A tossed cigarette butt may have started a fire on the McNeill Lake forest road last month (see photo p. 9). I find them everywhere — parks, beaches, parking lots and even local golf greens.
It seems clear that smokers unconsciously flick their finished butts. If that is the case, smokers are more hazardous than texting drivers during our increasingly dry summers.
So, what can be done? Surely they don’t all flick their butts but since we can’t tell which ones do, I propose that all smokers should be rounded up each spring and held in a facility until the rains return.
And the best part? Mexico will pay for it.
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