Bring Back Cancer Closets
It’s a hazard to one’s health to walk outside an office building these days. With so few places left where people are allowed to smoke, the clumps of co-workers huddling over cigarettes are growing like weeds. Smoke cloud-dodging takes so much skill, I hear it may become an Olympic sport.
I’m not in favour of taking away anyone’s right to ruin their health with cigarettes, although I am a bit militant that they don’t do it around me. I’m an ex-smoker who has developed an allergy to the stuff, like some sort of defence mechanism, you know, like the way a porcupine throws its quills. So I make no apologies for not wanting to be around smoke – and don’t even get me started on the stench of cigars – but I think things were better the way they were about 10 years go.
Back then, I was at CHML and the smokers were crowding into a tiny room some of us nicknamed the Cancer Closet. It was right off the announcers’ common area, housing our computers and mail bunks. The CC had glass walls, which allowed those of us breathing clean air on the outside to observe the smokers on the inside. It probably sat five comfortably, but 10 or 12 would sometimes huddle in there, puffing away. The blissful part was, almost no smoke leaked out of the room. There might have been an occasional hint of an odour when someone opened the door to enter or leave the closet, but it was never overwhelming. Not like, say, having to walk through a cluster of 6 quick-puffers on a break outside the building in which you work. It also helped productivity. No one had to take an elevator down several floors to satisfy their nicotine craving. The Closet was right down the hall.
Forcing smokers outside won’t do anything to break them of the habit. Instead, it’s creating an even bigger divide between the smokers and the non-smokers. I’m already tired of holding my breath every time I approach the Rogers Campus on foot. The city of Toronto’s new anti-smoking bylaw also means many restaurant patios now fill up with smokers, so those of us who don’t like our lunch served with a dash of tobacco must eat indoors. Segregation was working. The two camps co-existed well when kept apart by walls and businesses went to a lot of trouble to create Cancer Closets and Cancer Caverns for their smoking customers. Now we’re getting all mixed up together on the streets of the city and it’s not working out very well for any of us.
