NO BODY SMOKES HERE - ANYMORE

At what point does a person who is blowing their cigarette smoke directly into their childs face, realise what they are doing is 100 percent stupid, dangerous and wrong?

I’m guessing never or else they just wouldn’t be doing it.

From January of this year, it has become illegal in Queensland, for an adult to smoke with any child (up to 16 years of age) in the car. The cops can stop the car and fine the perpetrator two hundred dollars. Two hundred bucks? Pfft, these people are shelling out thousands of dollars a year for their durries, often foregoing healthy food for their children to secure them. Do the powers that be, really think that kind of fine is incentive enough to stop them having their morning school drop off ciggie? Clearly not if the amount I see on my way to school is anything to go by. I mean, seriously, the people who are doing this have no respect for their own children. As if they have any for the law.

I have spent a lot of time at the Gold Coast hospital of late. Enough time in fact, to accumulate 3 parking tickets in 12 days. Kind of hard to keep feeding the meter when you have a sick child you cannot leave. Something the State and local government must remedy for unavoidably long hospitals stays. A whole other blog though.

The hilarious thing that in actual fact, is not very funny at all, is that to the side of the entrance of this particular hospital, is a void, probably originally designed for patients and families to have a little outside downtime. Everywhere you look are big No Smoking Signs. Nobody smokes here anymore, apparently.

Everywhere you look are young people, old people, people with obvious hair loss due to chemo, people hooked up to IV’s in wheelchairs, people with their children sitting next to them; all having a fag. This is not a rant against smoking, he who casts the first stone and all that, but I do have a major problem with a place of healing and health i.e. a hospital facilitating, almost encouraging people (with cigarette bins in non-smoking areas and zero officers patrolling the area) to do it on their grounds. And directly into my face when I walk in with my children.

When Mum was a patient here, I vividly remember an older lady who ducked out 10 minutes before she was meant to be getting prepped for brain surgery for a cigarette she had been repeatedly warned, not to have. When she came back, the medical team were there waiting for her. They then refused to operate on when it was clear what she had been doing. She lost it. Ranting and raving and her daughter, who had taken her down for the smoke, also got quite aggressive towards the doctors. Um. For fucks sakes, how can someone help you when you won’t help yourself?

More often than not, a visit to the hospital, unless you a visiting a newborn, involves an element of stress. A lot of people’s answer to stress is a puff on a cigarette. I get that, but it’s time for the government to act and make smoking illegal on hospital grounds and its entrances. Seeing as they love making money out of my inability to fill a parking meter on time and jacking up rates so they can take unnecessary trips to Radelaide, perhaps the local council should take over governing this.

I really don’t care who polices it, it simply just needs to happen. And fast.