Argumentative
Justin Brennan
I think smoking in public places needs to be banned. As a citizen I feel that my family and I should be able to have a choice whether we want to be around cigarette smoke or not. The laws on smoking in public areas are getting much better, but we still need to make more changes. There is no smoking in places like restaurants, bus stops, and some buildings and parks, but not all the laws get enforced as well as they could. There are lots of reasons people think that smoking in public areas is okay, but do the smokers think about the other people around them? It is not fair to the people who have made the choice not to smoke, to have to walk through a group of smokers’ second hand smoke to get into a store, or to look at cigarette butts scattered all over the city they live in. Non- smokers should have the right to choose if they want to be around cigarette smoke. We need to make a change. Smoking in public places needs to be banned, if people want to smoke in public there should be designated smoking areas spread all throughout the city. That way anybody who didn’t want to be around the second hand smoke wouldn’t have to be, and the cigarette butts who will pick these up? If our city treated the public smoking issue with a little more consideration, I’m sure we would have less people smoking and we would have a much healthier and cleaner city. Those against the ban could say that smoking bans would be bad for certain businesses, and that a ban could lead to a drop in sales if people weren’t allowed to smoke right outside on the sidewalks or parking lots. Smokers light a smoke because they need to smoke, not because they want to, because nicotine is physically addictive. Therefore, some smokers think that the public smoking ban is unfair to them as citizens. I think the public smoking ban needs to be taken more seriously. Smokers should not be made to look like bad citizens, but