h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I think you overstate your case slightly at one point - you say that short term effects of nicotine include vomiting. How many smokers do you see lighting up, then throwing up? No, me neither.

This weakens your case because your average tobacco addict will seize on that one slip and say "Aha, that is completely wrong, therefore everything else in this entry is also wrong." Bad reasoning, of course, but people are like that.

You might also like to mention passive smoking, if only briefly. This is my personal pet hate. If I complain about a smoke-filled room, the smokers tend to say "There's no proof about passive smoking being harmful" which may or may not be true - can you enlighten me? Mind you, there is plenty of proof about passive smoking being a foul stink, but that never seems to bother the offenders.

My apologies. On checking back I see that you DO mention passive smoking. I couldn't work out how to have the entry in front of me as I wrote the posting. Anyway, I still think that you might like to say a little more about it, as there are almost certainly far more passive smokers than active smokers. One person smoking in a pub inflicts his/her stink on everyone else there. I don't stand on the bar and piss on the smoker - why should he/she subject me to the gaseous equivalent?

Hi Underhill!

I've added in the fact that exposure to tobacco smoke is passive smoking. So anyone who breathes in tobacco smoke can, I guess, receive all the nasty chemicals that a smoker does, be they smoker or non. I dont want to add anything too much - you have to try to make an entry balanced, and I think this would well tip it too far to the anti-smoking side. Indeed, I didnt really intend it to be an anti-smoking article, more of an info article which the reader can take either way.

And what do you think of the way that I've left vomiting in??