Let me preface this by saying I am a smoker who almost always moves away from random non-smokers before I light up (If they know me, they know being around me means being around smoking and if I'm in a designated smoking area, they are responsible for their exposure to my smoke).
Anyway, I also have a very deadly shellfish allergy. I have had reactions from being in the vicinity of people shellfish (especially because people eat shellfish like ****ing savages, tearing at the shells and spraying that poisonous **** everywhere). I have had two experiences where I had to be rushed to the hospital and in neither instance did I actually
consume shellfish. I ate food that was cooked in the vicinity where shellfish was cooked. I also have reactions just
talking to people who have eaten shellfish recently. My face will break out in hives. I could actually be used as a shellfish detector. Just hold me near the place where the shellfish is suspected and if I break out in hives, it's shellfish alright.
Anyway, unlike second-hand smoke, second-hand shellfish can quite literally kill me immediately. My throat swells up and I lose my ability to breathe. I can go into anaphylactic shock in a very short period of time. If you've never had an extreme allergic reaction to somehting, I hope you never do. Its miserable.
But all of this means I have to take extra-special precautions when I go to restaurants. Before I order anything, I ask about their cooking practices, find out what amounts of shellfish they serve, learn if they have separate grills and fryers for people with shellfish allergies (surprisingly, seafood restaurants are more likely to have these things than other restaurants, but for me to even go in the door of these places I need to have taken allergy medicine and have some emergency medicine on hand for immediate use in case my food somehow becomes contaminated or the air in the room has too much allergen in it).
It's a huge inconvenience for me when I go out to dinner. My life would be MUCH better and safer if shellfish were banned from being served at restaurants. If the ignorant shellfish eaters want to eat shellfish, they can do so in their own homes and not expose me to something that can kill me within minutes. At the very least life would be safer and easier if any restaurant that cooked shellfish in the vicinity of non-shellfish food should be closed down as a public danger and that every restaurant should have non-shellfish cooking utensils, plates, silverware, fryers, grills etc.
But I don't think like that.
I realize that I
don't have a right to go to any business establishment with an expectation that they will automatically cater to my desires, even though my issue is a life or death issue. And again, I'm not talking about an unlikely even that will occur years after exposure, but an immediate reaction that is very life-threatening and guaranteed to happen if I'm exposed to shellfish. My right to not be exposed to shellfish does exist, but it ceases to exist when I make the choice to put myself in a place where exposure to shelfish is possible. This includes public places. I've had milder allergic reactions being in the same general area as someone grilling shrimp on a barbecue at a beach or tailgating. But I have no control, nor do desire to have the control, over whether or not people can cook or eat shellfish in public.
My physical inability this regard should not be the basis of removing their rights to enjoy a legal product wherever they wish to do so in public. Nor should it be the basis of removing a business owners right to allow people to use this legal product in their establishment if they so desire.
I take complete responsibility for protecting myself from exposure. Granted, if I make a request at a restaurant and they say that they will fulfill that request and fail to follow through on that, I get very angry. That's only happened once at a wedding that had a surf and turf dinner (I will say that who has surf and turf at their wedding is a total asshole if they don't put that on the invite. Anything with nuts in it too should go on the invite. It sucks to get to the wedding to learn I'm just dropping off the card and getting the hell out of there. After my experience at the aforementioned wedding that ****ed up my request for turf-only cooked separately from the shrimp, I no longer attend weddings with surf and turf as the dinner). But the point is that the responsibility is IMO, entirely my own.
I feel the same way about cigarette smoke. In fact, I probably have less sympathy fro non-smokers because if you put me in a room full of shrimp and a non-smoker in a room full of smoke, I'd bet every dime that I have that only one of us will end up dead within a couple of hours (it'd be easy to bet every dime that I had in that situation because I'd be dead and would no longer need the money :2razz
.