Our Neighbors Smoke

We have an apartment above some people who smoke at least 5 times a day. Most of the those 5 times are right beneath our window or in the staircase that leads to our apartment. Our apartment gets really stuffy really easily so we like to keep our windows open. This has been problematic since the neighbors below us moved in and starting smoking outside our window. I don't know if I believe every statistic I've heard about secondhand smoke, but I do believe this:

"Between 70% and 90% of non-smokers in the American population, children and adults, are regularly exposed to secondhand smoke. It is estimated that only 15% of cigarette smoke gets inhaled by the smoker. The remaining 85% lingers in the air for everyone to breathe. If a person spends more than two hours in a room where someone is smoking, the nonsmoker inhales the equivalent of four cigarettes." - from the University of Minnesota's website

I do not think that smokers are bad people - I know a few really good people that smoke. I do wish that smokers would be more considerate at public universities and around our apartment complex, though. However, I appreciate the freedom we have to smoke, and many other freedoms we are granted, so I will tolerate the secondhand smoke to a certain degree.

I will be glad when it starts to rain here for many reasons. One of them being that our neighbors might smoke less in front our apartment and in our stairwell. I wouldn't mind if they smoked outside our windows just once in a while. It's only because we have to deal with it 4 to 5 times a day, and that's on a low-smoke day, that we are getting irked. Oh well, could be worse. They could be smoking something other than cigarettes.

Here is a Mahler caricature to enjoy: