Citing Risks, Health Officials Attack Third-Hand Smoke

BOSTON. Todd Fleming is a commuter who actually enjoys his twice-daily train rides, even when inclement weather has others fuming. “It’s the one time of the day I get a chance to read,” says the father of two young boys who is an options trader by day. “If it weren’t for my family and my job, I’d never get off.”

And so as Fleming settles into his aisle seat and opens up “The Treasure of Sierra Madre” by B. Traven, later made into a movie starring Humphrey Bogart, he is expecting a peaceful ride home when an elderly woman next to the window speaks up. “Excuse me–there’s no smoking on the T,” she says politely but firmly, using the common abbreviation for Boston’s public transit system.

Confused, and guessing that his seatmate is in her dotage, he gently corrects her. “I’m not smoking, ma’am,” he says, but she persists.

“Maybe you aren’t, but the characters in that book of yours are,” she sniffs as she turns her head hoping to catch the eye of a conductor.

“All right–I’ll read short stories where the characters chew Nicorette gum.”

Fleming is a victim of the latest health crusade to originate in Boston, which is home to a number of world-class teaching hospitals in addition to descendants of the Puritans, who live to improve the lives of their fellow citizens–whether they like it or not. “Third-hand smoke is in many ways more dangerous than second-hand smoke,” says Dr. Raymond Ellington, a pulmonologist at Massachusetts Lying-In and Sitting-Around Hospital. “Second-hand smoke you can see, third-hand smoke you may not even notice as you walk past a rack of paperback books.”

“See that icky black stuff? This guy’s been watching too many noir movies.”

Third-hand smoke is produced by fictional characters in books and movies that predate the nation’s obsession with physical health and well-being, and is believed to be the cause of significant preventable adverse health outcomes, including death, disfigurement and inability to remember Red Sox players’ batting averages. “You take a novel by Charles Dickens,” says Melinda Garfield-Owens, an adjunct faculty member at the University of Massachusetts-Seekonk. “A lot of the minor characters are out of the plot for long periods of time when they could be picking pockets or wasting away in debtors’ prisons.”

Bacall: “You were expecting maybe Katherine Hepburn?”

And so Fleming and others like him are consigned to special cars on trolleys and commuter rail routes where they suffer in silence as they read books or, if they bring laptops or video disc players, watch noir movies in which actors and actresses from a bygone era puff away to their hearts’ content. “It’s sad that I have to live in the shadows,” says Philip Weiner, an architect who takes the train because his office provides him with a breathtaking view of traffic crawling at a snail’s pace along Interstate 93. “Then again, movies with cigarettes in them are aesthetically much better for you.”