Sick by Association: The Dangers of Second-Hand Smoke

My parents have been cigarette smokers for as long as I can remember. Scattered through my childhood memories are random images of elegant Virginia Slims wrappers and emerald-green Newport boxes. In fact, about half of all of the pictures in our family photo album have my dad with a lit cigarette in his hand. I never understood how my mom could abstain from nicotine use for the nine months she was carrying me and then soon after my birth pick up the habit like it was an old friend back from grad school.

My parents grew up in the 1960s. This was a time when a vast majority of the public was beginning to learn just how dangerous the effects of tobacco usage were for the user. 1966 was the first year that cigarette packaging was required to have any kind of cautionary label about the hazards of cigarette smoking, and even then that label didn’t elude to exactly what those hazards were until 1985 when the label finally read, “SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, and May Complicate Pregnancy.” The warnings continued to grow in detail over the next 20, but as proven by a survey conducted by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in 2007, still 43.4 million of U.S. adults were current cigarette smokers.

It’s one thing if my parents wanted to play Russian roulette with their own health, but what about that of their children’s? The fact is that many people, my parents included, fail to take the effects of second-hand smoke all that seriously. It’s not that I believe my parents loved me any less, but honestly, they’re old school and had difficulty making the connection between how the smoke that they inhaled into their own lungs could somehow affect my sister and I, who were tucked tightly every night in our bedrooms all the way down the hallway.

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