Originally Posted by fredgarvin7

I believe that ex-smokers like myself have very little right to criticize smokers. We all did exactly the same things that we get so sanctimonious about with current smokers. I find I am much LESS able to tolerate cigarette smoke AFTER quitting than I was before I smoked. Yet even so, the whiff of cigarette smoke i get from passing cars is no more than another bad smell to me. Some people here have the attitude of a guy who wrote a letter to editor of the local paper back when there were separate smoking and non-smoking sections in restaurants. The writer wrote self-rightiously about how he and his wife were at the last table of the non-smoking section. He complained that smoke from the first table in the smoking section was bothering his wife-a non-smoker. He asked the smoker to stop and when he refused, saying he was in the smoking section, the letter writer freaked out, causing a scene in the diner. The writer bemoaned that he was a smoker for 20 years and that HE was able to quit, and why couldn't the guy in the diner stop, since it was causing his wife so much distress? Apparently, it never dawned on this pinhead that maybe 2 decades of him fouling the house where his wife lived with HIS cigarette smoke, was the REAL issue. So, I am slow to criticize the smoker, especially when he/she is obeying the rules.