It is Time to Make Smokefree Environments Work in India (Editorial‪)‬

Smoking cigarettes and other tobacco products not only harms the smoker, but pollutes the air and harms the nonsmokers around them (1,2). Indoor air pollution from second-hand tobacco smoke (SHS) contains about 6000 compounds, including arsenic, radioactive compounds, formaldehyde, benzene, vinyl chloride, carbon monoxide, ammonia, hydrogen cyanide, etc. Breathing these toxic chemicals causes heart disease, lung and breast cancer, asthma, sudden infant death and many other diseases. Indeed, previously secret research conducted by the multinational cigarette company Phillip Morris (now Altria) as early as 1980s showed that SHS was highly toxic, a finding which the company suppressed during the next two decades (3-5). Protecting people from these dangers is why the World Health Organization made the theme of World No Tobacco Day (May 31, 2007) "Smoke-Free Environments" (6). The tobacco companies have understood how dangerous concern over secondhand smoke is to their future. In 1978, for example, a secret report prepared for the Tobacco Institute, the industry's trade association in the United States, concluded that the nonsmokers' right movement was "the most dangerous development to the viability of the tobacco industry that has yet occurred" (7). Long before health authorities appreciated this fact, the industry understood that as smoking is restricted smokers will have less opportunity to smoke and will smoke fewer cigarettes per day or stop altogether (8), lowering its profits. Even more important, the nonsmokers' right movement and concomitant legislation reduce the social acceptability of smoking, making it harder for the tobacco companies to recruit new "customers" (9,10).