Smokers Refuse to Believe that Smoking Bad

Many Indonesian smokers still refuse to believe that smoking is bad for their health despite thousands of medical studies that support the claim. “There are still people out there who doubt the scientific evidence regarding the negative impacts of smoking for health, saying, ‘a chain smoker in my village is still alive at 97 years of age,’ ” the Health Ministry’s director general for environmental health and disease control Tjandra Yoga Aditama said on Sunday. Tjandra said smoking had nothing to do with smokers’ economic and working conditions. “For some of our people, smoking has become a culture,” he lamented. He said that to overcome the problem, anti-smoking programs should be conducted based on strong scientific evidence of cigarettes’ impact on health, economic and social conditions.

Smoking Prohibited at Brookhaven Town Beaches

Smoking laws just got more stringent in Brookhaven Town, as the Town Board voted recently to add town beaches to the list of places where smoking is banned. In the original January 2011 law, the town banned smoking in its parks, playgrounds, pools, golf courses, cemeteries and athletic fields. The law would prohibit anyone from smoking or carrying lighted cigarettes or other smoking devices at those locations. The amendment adding beaches is effective immediately. Councilwoman Kathy Walsh (R-Centereach) sponsored the original legislation and said beaches were not included to ensure the original resolution would pass easily. "When I drafted the original law we were concerned about getting opposition to it," she said in a phone interview Tuesday. "So what we tried to do originally was try and make it an enforceable law and something we wouldn't get a lot of resistance to."