Why Smoking Needs To Go...

I hate cigarette smoke. Yeah...I said it. There's two things I  hate in this world: cigarettes and mayonnaise. Both of those things just so happen to be terrible for you. I personally think smoking should be made illegal in all public places and should not be allowed outside the confines of your own home or property. Nothing can ruin any life moment more than a big deep breath of second-hand cigarette smoke encountered: outside in the park, on the beach, in my own apartment from neighbors smoking (stink up your own house dammit!), outside the gym (ridiculous), or anywhere else I may be enjoying my day. If you want to cancer up your lungs, well then it is your free choice, but please keep that stuff away from me, other people who don't smoke, health conscious people and for crying out loud...CHILDREN. Here's the verdict on the dangers of second-hand smoke for all the weenie smokers who will claim there is no biological evidence smoking hurts other people:

Based on the level of nicotine in the urine, the scientists also divided the volunteers into three groups: smokers, who showed the highest level of the tobacco metabolites; nonsmokers, who showed none of these compounds and a low-exposure group who fell in between. Comparing the 372 genes among these three groups, they found that the low-exposure group shared 34% of the same active genes with nonsmokers and 11% of the same gene activity with smokers. The low-exposure group included both nonsmokers who have never lit up as well as those who admitted to smoking only occasionally.

Furthermore...

"What is interesting to me is how sensitive the lung cells are to any cigarette smoke," he says. "It doesn't matter if you are walking into a cocktail party where other people are smoking or if you smoke one cigarette a week. No matter what level of exposure you have, your lung cells know it and they are responding. It's sort of like canaries in the coal mine - they are crying out and saying, 'I'm changing here, I'm changing the genes that I turn on and off in response to this environmental stress.'" - Yahoo! News