Okay...so they say smoking is bad for your health. They've been announcing this forever. The campaigns for anti smoking have been put up everywhere in the world. From places where people definitely have no rights to smoke such as hospitals and classes, to open-aired places which used to be where people escape to smoke. Should there be a special smoking room provided, it whether has no exhaust fan working properly or it would be located in the worst spot that may be so far away from nowhere. First, they would tell you how bad it can damage your health especially lungs. Then, they started telling you that you would also damage somebody else'. There used to be a warning written in words only on each package of cigarette, now they add some creepy looking pictures of damaged lungs to go along with the wordings.
I remember back in the 80's when there was a case of a 20 year-old college student in Nevada, US, who suffered a pretty bad lungs cancer that cost him his life short after. The news was on local paper which was followed by a very long article about how clove cigarettes could be lethal as they claimed those were what caused his dead. At the time, I was 22 and had been a heavy cloves smoker for about 3 years. Clove cigarettes were not find in the US then, and you could only find them in 7-11 stores. And whatever brands you found, they didn't represent the good ones like those which were popular in where they were supposed to be imported from, Indonesia. I tried to smoke them once and I hated their unfamiliar tastes. I didn't know why they tasted weird but I thought somebody must have done something to them between the time they unloaded them from the ship (or whatever) and the time they send them away to the stores due to the strong taste and scent of the cloves.
People there might not recognize what it is they smell but they sure were annoyed by its odor. My friends and I were often told to put them out in the restaurant because of the other patrons' complaint. And we often ended up leaving the restaurant without paying the bills or even before we dined because we had refused to put them out for we believed we didn't brake any state law. We had nothing against the restaurant management since it was not their policy to forbid us from smoking cloves, we only thought we would not stand in their way in paying respect to the other patrons. After all, the coincidence might have occurred occasionally when we happened to be in the same place with people who got bothered by it.
That was over two decades ago, and you can find so many no-smoking area everywhere all over the world nowadays. When I visited Bangkok for the second time, I was surprised to find that I couldn't sit and smoke in the lobby of the same hotel in where I stayed on my first visit, and that was 6 months after my first visit. Apparently, a lot of institutions prefer to stand on the non-smokers' side and neglect the comforts sought by the smokers. I heard that in Singapore, you can't even smoke freely even when you're out door because of its strict laws. Here in Indonesia, the home land of clove cigarettes, there are more and more places that don't allow people to smoke or at least put a limitation in smoking. And what they call the smoking sections may likely be an out door spaces. They used to divide rooms into two sections but public places with no out door section would now turn into a smoking free joints. They may believe that having a smoking and no-smoking sections within one room is just the same as having a pee and non-pee area within one pool :p
Regardless how the no smoking campaign grows rapidly here, I personally believe that it would not last long. The cigarette business is a gold-mined-business. Smoking is a habit that isn't bad at all like doing drugs and it costs much cheaper too. It's a stress reliever and it's a good company for your coffee or even boosts. Yes, it may damage your lungs but it may happen to 1 every 50 people. As to proof it, you may find many healthy elderlies here who have been smoking (cloves) and still heavily smoke them. As long as one can balance it with a good eating order healthy problem such as lungs cancer can be prevented.
One thing I believe is that smoking and having good eating orders have been preventing me from suffering a gallbladder problem.:)
