"long-term smoking around children can affect some of them, but it doesn't affect every single child"

This kind of remark is why I wrote the song, and why this discussion is important. Even a small amount of secondhand smoke makes a dramatic, and measurable impact on healthy adults -- measurable vascular damage in twenty minutes in healthy adults (UCSF,Glanz study). Children's rapid cell division puts them at extreme risk for physical damage and disease, and that applies to every single child. "It's not **that** harmful..." someone remarked. Yes, it is. If you see someone smoking around a baby, you should speak up.

In areas where smoking restrictions become law, the incidence of heart attacks drops by 17%, and by 37% within three years in eight replicated studies. It doesn't bother me at all to remind this group of this information because it helps people understand that people with heart disease, like children, are more at risk than others and often don't realize their own condition until the attack.

I agree that there are other ills in the world, but this thread is not about drinking, and not about dogs, but rather about smokers who deliberately subject others to deadly secondhand smoke, and the policies which are changing public health for the better.

Smokers do not have to be outcasts or excluded in any way from anything. They can quite simply smoke outside the pub, or the fair, and even slap on a patch on a long flight, etc. There are plenty of smokers in my crowds who seem able to appreciate that its subject is secondhand and thirdhand smoke exposure, its target a behavior, rather than everyone who smokes.

Anyone who hears this song while smoking is by definition smoking near me, and that not only makes it useful to me as someone who performs a lot, but as I mentioned before, this song changed policy because of its comic, aggressive perspective. I think the song deserves some respect for that, but I get a big kick out of those in this discussion who are adamant about trying to bully others out of laughing at it, liking it, or appreciating that it has been very effective in both the policy change and tip jar category.

People constantly tell cancer survivors that they are playing for others' sympathy by simply mentioning that they survived cancer in an effort to intimidate them from mentioning it at all, another bullying tactic. You can have any emotional reaction you wish to have to this simple fact in our lives. But you won't shut us up, and there's nothing inappropriate about mentioning it. It is as much a part of our lives as our names, and most relevant to a discussion about secondhand smoke exposure, because that is the subject of the song.

I don't really worry much about people who deliberately misinterpret the song and then hop around demanding an apology. They're getting good exercise, after all.