Third-Hand Smoke Hurts Too

First-hand smoke is the stuff that goes right to your lungs, makes you look old and wrinkled before your time, gives you cancer and heart disease and a lot of other usually fatal diseases. Second-hand smoke? That’s the stuff you blow on other people to make them seriously sick, too.

Now, expect to hear a lot more about third-hand smoke. The Journal of Pediatrics this year ran a report on third-hand smoke, and the news media is picking up on it, too.

Third-hand smoke is the residue you can’t see that sticks to your clothes, your hair, the walls, floors and furniture. It’s why non-smokers know you’re a smoker even if you don’t have a cigarette in your hand. They can smell it in your hair, on your clothes and on anything else you’re near.

And those same poisons that you blow into your own lungs also are in the third-hand smoke that others can pick up by touching you, your walls, your floors, your furniture. There are 250 – yep, 250! – poisons found in cigarette smoke, according to surgeon general’s reports. Like cyanide and arsenic.

What should you do? Quit smoking!