Second Hand Litter

What is it about smoking? Full disclosure: I am not a smoker, but I am not maniacally opposed to others smoking. I do wonder though, about one aspect of the behavior of many smokers I observe: littering. For most folks I observe, littering is taboo. When the seventies passed by, so did the tacit consent society gave to the litterer. Aside from the occasional apple core or peach pit hurled out a car window, how often do you see somebody just throw their trash on the street these days? Wouldn't it jar the senses to see that?

Now think about smokers. How often do you see them toss their butts to the ground? I see it probably every day, certainly every week. I just saw it again this morning as I was entering my town's train station. A perfectly lovely lady, chatting about her children's affairs, took her last drag, and flicked the rest of her cigarette to the street. She gave no thought to it at all. Perfectly natural. For some reason it jarred me today. So I started looking around. Before I could board the train, which was only about 90 seconds later, I counted four other cigarette butts and an empty package of Marlboro lights flung around the place. No other litter, just this cigarette waste.

What gives? Why should this behavior be OK? There has to be an answer that a non-smoker cannot immediately appreciate. At least for the lit cigarette butts, it could be that disposing them in the normal trash is a fire hazard? So the process of disposing of the butt would include throwing it down, stepping on it, and then (indignity!) bending over to pick it up again before placing it in the trash. Sounds like a lot of work, I have to admit. And perhaps the avoidance of all this work leads folks to be more liberal about disposing anything to do with cigarettes, such as empty boxes.

I wonder if there is any upside in inventing a portable cigarette extinguisher? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!