In an apartment building on the Upper West Side of New York, 74th and Broadway, there is yet another controversy surrounding smoking and non-smoking residents.
While most of these issues involve smelling cigarette smoke from one apartment in another adjacent apartment, the debate this time is about the common area by the elevator. A couple doesn't want its four-year-old child to be exposed to the second-hand smoke and wants the smoking residents to stop smoking.
ACSH, an outspoken group on the dangers of smoking, does not discount the science when it comes to second-hand smoke -- there is no proven harm from inhaling cigarette smoke second-hand for a couple of moments a day while you are waiting in a hall for the elevator. The problem is the Surgeon General says there's no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke. If there really were no safe level of exposure then no child should ever be exposed to it.
But the issue here is more aesthetic than scientific, Dr. Ross points out, though even this is pushing it. "If I smell your smoke in my apartment, I believe I have reason to complain. But in a common area? I think they've gone too far."