Here's Why

Imaginary walls

The imaginary walls that we have all been relying on to seperate the air from smoking and non-smoking areas don’t work. I’ve been right for twenty years - imagine that!

ABC reports that Professor Bernard Stewart from Sydney’s South-East Area Health Service has made public the results of his research into “non-smoking zones” in restaurants, pubs and clubs today.

High levels of toxic chemicals were found throughout the clubs, regardless of air conditioners, ventilation systems or closed-in areas. In at least three of the seventeen clubs he studied, the levels of cigarette particles were actually higher in the “non-smoking” areas.

The NSW State government’s Smoke Free Environment Act 2000 currently makes it legal to smoke in any establishment that is licensed to sell liquor, as long as you are a few metres away from where food is sold. Then the imaginary wall is all that is left to protect you. Unless you travel by train.

CityRail refuses to enforce the anti-smoking legislation that was originally put in place in 1912, OR the 1983 NSW Occupational Health and Safety Act, OR the Rail Safety Act of 1999, OR the new-fangled law introduced in 2000. They made some announcements over the PA, deep underground at Town Hall station for a year, then they quietly took down all the non-smoking signs and all the staff returned to smoking on the job. No wonder so many train drivers turned out to be unfit to drive for health reasons! It was all the smoke in their workplace.

Of course they enforce the laws against litter at CityRail, but this is kind of unfair since they’ve taken away all the litter bins for reasons of “National Security”. I would have thought it was safer to make people throw their rubbish in a bin that staff can keep an eye on, than to have them be forced to leave boxes and bottles absolutely anywhere on a station platform or train. Its now harder to track potential terrorist parcels at a train station than it used to be before they removed the bins.

Resources:
The Non Smokers’ Movement of Australia
Action on Smoking and Health Australia
The Cancer Council NSW
Go Smoke Free in Pubs and Clubs
Militant Non-Smoking: A Modest Proposal by Ian Woolf from around 1988

About the author: Ian Woolf lives in Sydney, has a degree in Applied Physics, worked as a solar astronomer, software engineer, systems programmer, webmaster, Cisco CCNA tutor, Computational Theory lecturer, and subject coordinator; while changing his career to professional writing and broadcasting. Listen to Ian on the Discovery science show on radio 2SER 107.3Fm Mondays at 9am in Sydney or streaming audio on www.2ser.com, or listen to the Discovery sound archives.