Smoke Free CA?

One great thing about living in California is that it is very health conscience. Smoking is banned on beaches in Santa Monica. All restaurants are smoke-free unless you sit outside (and being Los Angeles, this option exists year ‘round). It’s great. I can easily go out for dinner or a drink (pre-pregnancy, of course), and come home smelling exactly as I did when I went out. Needless to say, as a non-smoker, I love it.

Unfortunately, one place you are still allowed to smoke is your home. And guess who lives below us? A smoker. Most of the time, we can’t smell it. And most of the time, we have the windows open (a bonus of living in southern California). But, there are times when he has his friends over or maybe gets depressed or creative or whatever one does when they chain smoke, and the smoke drifts into our apartment.

This happened a few times before I was pregnant, and it grossed my pristine lungs out. I would open the window, swear a few times and go back to bed. But now that I’m growing a baby, I know that the crap the asshole smokes downstairs isn’t only staining my lungs, it’s fucking with my baby.

Anyway, my whole point of writing this is that there are these ads that run on TV by tobaccofreeca.com. Some of the ads talk about second hand smoke, and how it travels through the vents to get to your neighbors. In one in particular, they show the smoke entering a kid’s room. What I don’t understand is this: clearly, the kid’s parents don’t smoke but the asshole neighbor does. If the asshole neighbor doesn’t care enough about his own health (it’s a guy in the ad), why would he stop smoking for the health of a neighbor’s kid? Who are the ads aimed at exactly?

If anything, the ads freak me out MORE about the second hand smoke. Maybe they are done in conjunction with the real estate association to get more people to buy single family homes to escape the smoke? Short of him moving out, I think the only other solution is for us to move into our own home and pray our next neighbors don’t smoke. If anyone has a more realistic solution, please let me know because the real estate market still hasn't crashed to normal yet.