The war with secondhand smoke has come up to an absolutely new and ridiculous limit.  The cigarettes smokers are currently being exorcised from every public place they attend, and now even from their homes of many years.

The new case of discrimination of smokers occurred at Santa Maria Park Apartments – residential complex where senior smokers have been forced to make a choice: they have to stop puffing after 3 months or they have to move out from their apartments. The new restriction has come like the bolt from the blue for those eighty-year-old smokers who began to light up in the early stages of their lives even a thought of giving up had been like a crushing blow to them.  

One of those senior residents, Martha Thompson, 85, has been smoking up to 20 cigarettes a day for the last 40 years, and said that both eviction and smoking cessation would be like a capital punishment for her. She said the she had nowhere to go so she risked finding herself in the street with her wheel-chair.

Santa Maria Park Apartments is a residential complex for low-income seniors. The complex has 78 units was launched in 1983, and residents were permitted to smoke inside their rooms and on their balconies until 2003.

However, according to Judd Reynolds of the John Johnson Co, the organization that governs the residential complex from the moment of its establishment, the prohibition on smoking for all newly-arrived residents was imposed in 2003, although the rules have not been changed for seniors who had already been living in the complex at the moment of that change.   

Reynolds stated that their company has received a great number of complaints from non-smoking residents regarding the cigarette smoke which was penetrating into rooms neighboring smoker’s units and even into hallways. She said that management tried to settle that issue by hanging out several warnings in last March and October where the administration urged smokers to give up smoking otherwise they would be deprived form all smoking privileges irrespective of how long they have lived in the complex.

He said that the management has been aware how difficult it would be for them to give up smoking, however the smoke was the cause of health complications for people suffering from asthma or for those non-smokers who found the smoke smell offensive. 

The question is what this handful of about a half-dozen senior smokers at Santa Maria Park Apartments would do? Smoking is the only remaining pleasure available for them.  

Santa Maria resident Christine Stewart , 82, complained that she started smoking when got married to a Navy sailor during World War II. She remembered that when she was young smoking was regarded as stylish and glamorous and every girl who wanted to be cool smoked.

Thompson, Stewart and the other senior smokers will be still permitted to smoke in a diminutive area of the back garden, which is more than 50 feet away from the complex. Simply imagine those elderly ladies one in the wheel-chair and another with crutches go there each time they want to light up no matter whether it is snowing or raining.

Simon Clark, the Forest Group president said that the situation with senior smokers is expulsion of smokers. He stated that throwing those octogenerians into the street, in order to punish them for their “politically incorrect” habit is unacceptable and notorious since smoking was promoted in the first decades of their lives.