Roe’s No-Smoking Plan Is Fuel for Feud : Mutual Consideration, Not Ban, Key to Dousing Running Conflict

Can Richard Roe be serious with his proposal to make the City of Del Mar a no-smoking zone? Or is he hitching a ride to political prominence on a rocket fueled by the animosity that smolders between smokers and non-smokers?

Either way, the sparks are sure to fly. That wouldn’t have to be if there were better understanding between the adversaries in this old and incendiary conflict.

In fairness, non-smokers should remember, if they enjoy chocolate candy, they shouldn’t be scornful or judgmental about those who enjoy tobacco. Almost any appetite or enjoyment can turn into an addiction. (How harmful the apple pie or the chocolate bar or the tobacco might become will depend upon individual sensitivities and the amount of exposure.)

By the same token, neither is it fair for those who can’t kick the breathing habit to be judged as neurotic troublemakers. Everyone’s eyes are sensitive. When something foreign, irritating or dangerous enters the eye, we all blink involuntarily. Tears usually flow to help wash away the irritating foreign substance, a natural automatic protective maneuver. The eyes of some people are more sensitive than those of others.

This is just as true of lungs. When something foreign, irritating or dangerous enters the bronchial tubes, they constrict, the linings sometimes swell and there may be an outpouring of secretions, an automatic protection against a foreign substance.

For some, this reaction is so strong that even a very small amount of tobacco smoke or other irritating substance can result in a trip to the emergency room or a desperate bout of breathlessness.

Many years as a nurse, along with 18 years’ writing on healing and health care, have led me to the view that people with breathing difficulties are among the most ignored, misunderstood, ill-cared-for and poorly regarded in the country.

The puzzling, often capricious, nature of some respiratory illnesses adds to the lack of understanding. Attacks often occur at night with no witness to the lonely struggles of these canaries in the coal mine of our world. They often fall prey to bizarre and unexplainable symptoms.

One of the biggest burdens for those who can’t take breathing for granted is the attitude of many (who are breathing freely) that respiratory problems are emotional, that they are self-induced.

Anyone who feels suffocation is imminent will get emotional about it and will be more so if kept helplessly waiting for rescue from those who are hostile and judgmental. Breathing problems can also be caused by infection, by genetic factors, along with whatever might affect the environment, the immune system, the life style.

The attitude of non-smokers could be likened to that of a diabetic who tells the world, “I don’t forbid you to eat sugar. Please just don’t sprinkle it on my food.”

A challenge: Three simple maneuvers to show what it is like for those who live with shortness of breath. (And what it might be like for you someday if you are setting yourself up for respiratory illness.)

- Pinch both nostrils shut, put a drinking straw in your mouth and try breathing through that narrow opening while you run in place or climb stairs.

- Breathe out for as long as you can, emptying your lungs as completely as possible. Without inhaling, tighten a belt or other strap around your lower ribs so as to limit the expansion of the rib cage. Now go on about your business. Try to be active, to function as well as usual.

- Get someone to put a hand over your nose and mouth every few hours in the night so you waken struggling to breathe. Keep that up night after night.

On a much larger scale, that is what life is like for many who are short of breath and who are forced to inhale secondhand tobacco smoke.

That is what life could be like for those who don’t show more regard for their own lungs and for the lungs of those they love and live around.

But Roe and the City of Del Mar would be making a big mistake if smokers are deprived of even the outdoors as a place for puffing. Push any living thing into a corner and you will get a cornered, combative reaction. As has been said of the street people, everybody has to be someplace.

At the same time, non-smokers have no choice. They must take their ailing and sensitive lungs with them wherever they go.