Remember the days of smoking sections on airplanes?  Good god, I do.  I was asthmatic as a kid (still am, though apparently I'm supposed to refer to myself as a "person with asthma" these days), and I remember my airways becoming increasingly constricted and my visual environs increasingly indistinct as the transcontinental flights we used to take on various family visits droned on.  

My one comfort was that cigarette smoke made me gassy when I was a lad, so when things got especially bad, I could respond to the bozos in the back and the thickening haze they were generating with some noxious fumes of my own.

I think I understood the absurdity of the Jim-Crow smoking rules even as a kid.  Back when doctors could endorse cigarettes, newscasters smoked on camera, and smoking was the cool norm, smoking sections didn't have to exist, because the world was one big ashtray.  Then the smokers got the best seats in the house.  Then the slightly-worse seats; then outside; then 30 feet from the door; and now, finally, next to the dumpster in the back.  Pretty soon restaurants and other public facilities will have to acquire a rotting skunk carcass to mark off their smoking areas, with surgeon general's warnings piped through a PA system on an endless loop.  I almost feel sorry for the poor schlubs.

Apparently I'm not alone, because in recent years I've heard more and more noise about how the dangers of secondhand smoke have never been proven, that the numbers have been greatly exaggerated, nay, invented out of whole cloth, and can we all stop being so high-and-mighty about this one particular vice, because, let's face it, we already know all the facts and it's still a massive undertaking to quit?

And it sounded convincing:  all the ghettoization had to stop somewhere, and maybe it was time for a dollop of sympathy for our poor, addicted, yellow-teethed, stinky-breathed brethren.

Well, last week, Alwyn Cosgrove, a Scot clearly keeping an eye on the health of his fellow countrymen, sent me this link to a Reuter's story that basically says, 'not so fast:'

Scotland's 2006 ban on smoking in public places cut the heart attack rate by 17 percent within one year, with non-smokers benefiting most, researchers reported on Wednesday.

    The study is the first real-time, large-scale look at how a ban on second-hand smoke might benefit smokers and nonsmokers...

    "A total of 67 percent of the decrease involved non-smokers," Dr. Jill Pell of the University of Glasgow and colleagues wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine.

    The number of people admitted to nine Scottish hospitals for a heart attack dropped 14 percent among smokers, 19 percent among former smokers and 21 percent for those who had never smoked.

Interesting that the nonsmokers actually benefited more.  Could it be that occasional, indirect exposure to cigarette smoke is actually more dangerous in the short term than direct, chronic exposure?   Do smokers grow some protective crust in their lung lining that buys them a few extra years?  Stay tuned for the 2015 test results...