Don non-smoking sections or ventilation protect nonsmokers?
Smoking and nonsmoking sections don’t work. Smoke spreads evenly through the air without paying attention to what section it’s in. Research from the University of California at Berkeley (PDF) shows that sitting in the non-smoking section of a restaurant for two hours is the equivalent of smoking one and one half cigarettes. Working an 8-hour shift at a bar, a nonsmoker would inhale the equivalent of 16 cigarettes. Ventilation systems do not remove toxins from the air. They only dilute them. Even Philip Morris USA, the largest cigarette company in America, states that ventilation systems do NOT protect your health: “…the use of high-quality ventilation systems to minimize smoke in the air.
