Smokers’ rights don’t outweigh non-smokers’

To the editor:

In 1987 my grandmother lost a painful two-year-long fight with lung cancer. Despite giving up half a lung, the disease ended her life prematurely. She had smoked for just one year of her life, at age 16. But she had been exposed for most of her 77 years to secondhand smoke from friends and strangers. And at age 75, she was diagnosed with lung cancer.

As we debate the merits of banning smoking in New Hampshire restaurants, we need to look beyond the many savings in health-care costs and even past the lives it may save to plain facts. No one’s right to smoke outweighs our right to a healthy life. We need to make as many public places free of cancer-causing smoke. No one — no restaurant server, no child, no adult — should be subjected to cancer-causing smoke.

Jayme H. Simões
Concord