A request to the smokers of the world

Dear smokers,

As somebody that shares your side-walks, bus stops, park benches, beaches, lakes, rivers, and scenic outlooks, I have a minor request. And I know this doesn't pertain to all of you, but it seems to pertain to a lot of you, possibly most of you.

You know that bit of the cigarette that you put in your mouth and don't smoke? The cigarette butt? Please don't throw it on the ground/street/gutter when you're done with it. Instead, please throw it in the trash, where it belongs.

Now that might seem like a lot of work for something so trivially small, I know. But have you ever stopped and looked at how many cigarette butts are littered near a bus stop? Or a flower bed next to a fountain in the park? Or even a garden outside a hospital? It's more than you'd care to count.

Apparently, 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are littered each year. Here's a few ways to wrap your head around that number. If you placed those cigarette butts end-to-end at the equator, they would form a line that circled the globe three times. If you put them in a pile, the pile would take up a city block and be 8 stories high. The littering rate equals 142 per second. That's equivalent to over 2 per day per person on the planet. Or, another way to look at it: every time somebody on the planet takes a dump, somebody litters a cigarette butt. (Give or take.) That's a shit-load of litter. And the reason for it? As far as I can tell it's a combination of apathy and sheer laziness on the part of smokers. Junkies are probably more careful about disposing of their needles.

I knew a smoker that worked in remote parts of the world, where he was about a 2 hour flight from any road. He would store cigarette butts in a bag in his pocket for weeks until a plane came to deliver food and pick up garbage. So please don't tell me that carefully extinguishing the butt on the side of your shoe/a tree/the garbage can and then tossing the butt in the trash is too much work. If it were, this friend of mine would have burnt his pants off years ago.

A lot of smokers complain that their rights to smoke are being violated by a repressive anti-smoking society. That's fine and fair, and in a lot of instances it probably is going too far. But remember that it's not your bus stop/park/whatever; you're sharing it with hundreds, maybe thousands of people. My mom used to tell me that with privilege comes responsibility. If your kid ate 5 Popsicles a day and couldn't eat a Popsicle without leaving the Popsicle stick lying in the yard, how long would it be before you made an ultimatum about it?

Please lead by example.