Posted on 07/27/2011 6:54:41 AM PDT by Responsibility2nd
To the list of places where smokers no longer will be able to light up — government buildings, parks, restaurants and bars — public housing residents in San Antonio soon will add one more: their own homes.
The San Antonio Housing Authority plans to impose a new policy in January that will prohibit residents from smoking indoors or away from designated outdoor spots at all 70 of its public sites.
The ban, which will affect about 15,800 residents, aims to protect nonsmokers from secondhand smoke and follows a growing nationwide trend to eliminate smoking at public housing authorities.
Since 2009, when the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development issued a directive that “strongly” encouraged housing authorities to adopt nonsmoking policies, the number of agencies that have banned the practice has more than doubled to an estimated 250, according to the Smoke Free Environments Law Project, a Michigan nonprofit that tracks the number.
San Antonio will become the biggest housing authority in Texas and one of the largest in the country to adopt a smoking ban, joining other major agencies in Boston, Detroit, Portland and Seattle.
“It’s our responsibility to provide a living environment that’s healthy, safe and comfortable and, frankly, your neighbor’s smoke can often impair that,” said Melanie Villalobos, a spokeswoman for SAHA.
The no-smoking rule will debut here in August or September at the newly renovated Lewis Chatham Apartments, a single, four-story building for the elderly on the South Side.
SAHA’s other properties are expected to go smoke-free in January, but the details of how the new policy will work at each site, including the locations of designated smoking areas, remain undetermined.
Residents will be prohibited from smoking within about 20 feet of exterior doorways, and those who repeatedly violate the rule could face eviction.
The housing authority began putting out the word about the new policy earlier this year, opening the discussion at resident meetings and surveying tenants.
Later this month, the housing authority plans to launch an educational campaign about the hazards of smoking and secondhand smoke. Residents who want to quit the habit also can get free smoking-cessation aids such as patches and lozenges, provided through the agency’s partnership with the American Cancer Society.
The housing authority put off a planned start date in July after studying how other agencies had dealt with the issue. Among the most important lessons was that residents were more agreeable to the change if they had time to prepare and received health information.
“The education campaign is the most important part,” said Lori Mendez, the housing director for the elderly and disabled who has spearheaded the effort. “Residents need to understand the expectations.”
Kids exposed to smoke
Many residents have yet to hear about the change, but so far the new policy has inspired a mix of strong support, ambivalence and anger.
A survey sent to all 6,029 households in January shows that a large majority of tenants support the no-smoking policy. Of the 200 residents who responded, 81 percent said they liked the idea, while 17 percent opposed it, and 2 percent said they had no opinion.
In some cases, smokers decried what they view as a violation of their rights.
“This is my house even though I’m receiving help from SAHA, and I should be able to smoke in my own home if I want to,” one resident wrote.
Another resident who smokes on the balcony suggested forcing residents to go outside would put them at risk.
“It’s dangerous enough at daytime. Understand that you will be putting people’s lives in danger,” the tenant wrote.
But many cheered the idea, and some smokers even welcomed the change as an inducement to help them quit.
“I think it’s really, really great. I want to stop,” said Norma Garcia, 47, who smokes about a pack a day inside her Wheatley Courts apartment on the East Side. “They’re doing something that’s for our own good.”
That's pretty much the way I look at it, if your going to live off the "masters" largess, don't be surprised when he treats you like a slave. Don't like it? Then go get and education, a good job, buy a home of your own, then smoke your lungs out.
Did you see the story yesterday of the US postal worker who claimed he was beaten and mugged outside the post office because he wanted to get away from everything for a day or two? Security cams can be a b.....
You (correctly) identified smoking as a legal right. But is it good, healthy and beneficial?
Abortion is a legal right too. But that doesn’t mean I want to subsidize it with my tax dollars.
San Antonio City government consists of Political Pygmys and Mental Midgets. They focus on the “Critically Insignificant” garbage while the infrastrucure goes in the Crapper.
Fighting for Soccer stadiums, against bar chains with Bikini topped waitresses, while the roads are degenerating into Third World Donkey paths. They keep using the phrase “World Class City”. Yup, Turd World.
The recently took a stand and banned smoking in bars, which is much like banning Farting in restrooms
There was chow, recreation, place to sleep, warm in winter, well ventilated in summer, and so on.
They were considered "resorts" by a certain class of folks ~ mostly friends and family of folks who'd been committed for good reasons.
They also seem to have window ac units. Who paid for that and who is paying the electric bill?
If it's "public" housing, IT'S NOT THEIR OWN HOME.
Wanna smoke at home? Git off yer fat arses, git out of taxpayer owned housing, and git YER OWN!
These people do not own those homes, nor do they earn the money for their cigarettes. As a homeowner, I work a job, I pay my taxes, and my freedoms are still being removed daily.
Its about time the deadbeats and illegals get in on all the fun I'm having /s
I used to smoke, but quit when the cost went over $1.25 per pack at the PX. I stopped to fuel up the other day and a lady bought a carton of cigs. $55.00 per carton!
How 'bout we deport the MS13 gang bangers? WTF are illegal aliens doing in my po' folks housing complex? GTTFOOMC!!!
You have to ask?
There - fixed it!
That was my first thought, too.
New York (not where I live), cigs are over $10 a PACK, over or $100 A CARTON!!!
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The air according to OSHA
Posted on Monday, January 05, 2009 7:13:49 AM by harleyrider1978
THE AIR, ACCORDING TO OSHA
Though repetition has little to do with "the truth," we're repeatedly told that there's "no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke."
OSHA begs to differ.
OSHA has established PELs (Permissible Exposure Levels) for all the measurable chemicals, including the 40 alleged carcinogens, in secondhand smoke. PELs are levels of exposure for an 8-hour workday from which, according to OSHA, no harm will result.
Of course the idea of "thousands of chemicals" can itself sound spooky. Perhaps it would help to note that coffee contains over 1000 chemicals, 19 of which are known to be rat carcinogens. -"Rodent Carcinogens: Setting Priorities" Gold Et Al., Science, 258: 261-65 (1992)
There. Feel better?
As for secondhand smoke in the air, OSHA has stated outright that:
"Field studies of environmental tobacco smoke indicate that under normal conditions, the components in tobacco smoke are diluted below existing Permissible Exposure Levels (PELS.) as referenced in the Air Contaminant Standard (29 CFR 1910.1000)...It would be very rare to find a workplace with so much smoking that any individual PEL would be exceeded." -Letter From Greg Watchman, Acting Sec'y, OSHA, To Leroy J Pletten, PHD, July 8, 1997
Indeed it would.
Independent health researchers have done the chemistry and the math to prove how very very rare that would be.
As you're about to see in a moment.
In 1999, comments were solicited by the government from an independent Public and Health Policy Research group, Littlewood & Fennel of Austin, Tx, on the subject of secondhand smoke.
Using EPA figures on the emissions per cigarette of everything measurable in secondhand smoke, they compared them to OSHA's PELs.
The following excerpt and chart are directly from their report and their Washington testimony:
CALCULATING THE NON-EXISTENT RISKS OF ETS
"We have taken the substances for which measurements have actually been obtained--very few, of course, because it's difficult to even find these chemicals in diffuse and diluted ETS.
"We posit a sealed, unventilated enclosure that is 20 feet square with a 9 foot ceiling clearance.
"Taking the figures for ETS yields per cigarette directly from the EPA, we calculated the number of cigarettes that would be required to reach the lowest published "danger" threshold for each of these substances. The results are actually quite amusing. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a situation where these threshold limits could be realized.
"Our chart (Table 1) illustrates each of these substances, but let me report some notable examples.
"For Benzo[a]pyrene, 222,000 cigarettes would be required to reach the lowest published "danger" threshold.
"For Acetone, 118,000 cigarettes would be required.
"Toluene would require 50,000 packs of simultaneously smoldering cigarettes.
"At the lower end of the scale-- in the case of Acetaldehyde or Hydrazine, more than 14,000 smokers would need to light up simultaneously in our little room to reach the threshold at which they might begin to pose a danger.
"For Hydroquinone, "only" 1250 cigarettes are required. Perhaps we could post a notice limiting this 20-foot square room to 300 rather tightly-packed people smoking no more than 62 packs per hour?
"Of course the moment we introduce real world factors to the room -- a door, an open window or two, or a healthy level of mechanical air exchange (remember, the room we've been talking about is sealed) achieving these levels becomes even more implausible.
"It becomes increasingly clear to us that ETS is a political, rather than scientific, scapegoat."
Chart (Table 1)
-"Toxic Toxicology" Littlewood & Fennel
Coming at OSHA from quite a different angle is litigator (and how!) John Banzhaf, founder and president of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH).
Banzhaf is on record as wanting to remove healthy children from intact homes if one of their family smokes. He also favors national smoking bans both indoors and out throughout America, and has litigation kits for sale on how to get your landlord to evict your smoking neighbors.
Banzhaf originally wanted OSHA to ban smoking in all American workplaces.
It's not even that OSHA wasn't happy to play along; it's just that--darn it -- they couldn't find the real-world science to make it credible.
So Banzhaf sued them. Suing federal agencies to get them to do what you want is, alas, a new trick in the political deck of cards. But OSHA, at least apparently, hung tough.
In response to Banzhaf's law suit they said the best they could do would be to set some official standards for permissible levels of smoking in the workplace.
Scaring Banzhaf, and Glantz and the rest of them to death.
Permissible levels? No, no. That would mean that OSHA, officially, said that smoking was permitted. That in fact, there were levels (hard to exceed, as we hope we've already shown) that were generally safe.
This so frightened Banzhaf that he dropped the case. Here are excerpts from his press release:
"ASH has agreed to dismiss its lawsuit against OSHA...to avoid serious harm to the non-smokers rights movement from adverse action OSHA had threatened to take if forced by the suit to do it....developing some hypothetical [ASH's characterization] measurement of smoke pollution that might be a better remedy than prohibiting smoking....[T]his could seriously hurt efforts to pass non-smokers' rights legislation at the state and local level...
Another major threat was that, if the agency were forced by ASH's suit to promulgate a rule regulating workplace smoking, [it] would be likely to pass a weak one.... This weak rule in turn could preempt future and possibly even existing non-smokers rights laws-- a risk no one was willing to take.
As a result of ASH's dismissal of the suit, OSHA will now withdraw its rule-making proceedings but will do so without using any of the damaging [to Anti activists] language they had threatened to include." -ASH Nixes OSHA Suit To Prevent Harm To Movement
Looking on the bright side, Banzhaf concludes:
"We might now be even more successful in persuading states and localities to ban smoking on their own, once they no longer have OSHA rule-making to hide behind."
Once again, the Anti-Smoking Movement reveals that it's true motive is basically Prohibition (stopping smokers from smoking; making them "social outcasts") --not "safe air."
And the attitude seems to be, as Stanton Glantz says, if the science doesn't "help" you, don't do the science.
If a person, for whatever reason, depends on the State for their basic needs, then they must accept they can be forced to live at the mercy of totalitarian rules (for which there are always “good” reasons).
They are Democrat voters just yearning to fulfill their dreams with a little help from a beneficent state...
I’m entirely in favor of this. Public assistance of all forms should be as stingy, uncomfortable, inconvenient, and stigmatizing as possible, aimed at no higher goal than preventing people from starving to death in the gutter.
Welfare is a privilege, not a right, and it should NEVER be easier or more rewarding to loaf around on handouts from the public than to work at even the most menial and degrading manual labor.
Electoral fraud and socialism are the life-blood of the demonicRat party.
>>LOL! A LARGE majority! of the 200 people who responded! 162 people out of a survey sent to 6,209 households.<<
You didn’t take into account the percentage that is illiterate.
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