Butts . . . but really

You come over to my house, you love candy, the individually wrapped kind.  You pull into my driveway and you have a wrapper in your hand.  You get out of your car and you decide, you don’t want the trash in your car, so you figure it’s better in my driveway, so you throw the wrapper down on my driveway.

As you approach the door, you pop another candy into your mouth and yes, you’ve got that nasty wrapper again, not sure what to do because you don’t want to bring in the trash with you, so you toss it aside into the flowerbed.

As you are driving home, you pop another candy into your mouth and realizing again, you don’t want to dirty your car with this wrapper, so you decided the best solution is to throw it out the window. You do and to your amusement, you watch it hit the car behind you and bounce over the top of their car.  No harm, they did not even notice.

Most of us, right away would say what the person doing above is wrong, it is littering, it is against the law.  In fact, if we saw someone throwing trash out of their car, we might even report them.  However, how did the cigarette smoker get exempt?

None of us would throw our candy wrapper into our neighbors yard, but smokers don’t have a second thought about leaving their cigarette butts wherever they are.

They throw them out of their car while driving, they throw them down on the ground when they get out of their car, they throw them down on the ground before the enter an establishment without ever a thought they are littering.

Here is a study I just found about smoking:  A overwhelming number of smokers believe cigarette butts to be litter, yet it has not stopped them from doing it.

Do you consider cigarette butts to be litter?	Number	%	N	%
No/DK	138	13.8	27	2.7	81.39	0.00
Yes	862	86.2	973	97.3

From <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3397372/table/ijerph-09-02189-t002/?report=objectonly>

I don’t understand how cigarettes got the windfall as ok to litter.  Even though it is considered littering, it does not stop them, even from doing it right in front of you.  It’s almost like they have the right.  Hey, I am smoking, so I have the right to litter!  Really, I am hungry, so I will throw the wrapper to my hamburger out my window when I am done with it.  Hate to have that wrapper in my car.

The logic of throwing it out of the car just eludes me.  The smoker spends a bunch of money on the cigarettes, the smoker lights it and smokes it in their car.  They put all that tar and nicotine into their body, but for some reason cannot contain the trash of there delight until they get to a proper trash can?

Like drinking alcohol, this seems to be an accepted sin.  With the seemingly anti smoking campaigns around, the smokers, I would think, would want to make this habit less intrusive by picking up after themselves.  Maybe some do, regardless, too many still seem to believe someone else should pick up after they have spent the last few minutes poisoning and killing themselves, since they made such a sacrifice.

I am truly not upset or angry, just very confused about how this behavior is so accepted.  God Bless!

 

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