When your landlord tells you this in response to your concerns about smoke coming in to your room from the neighbors, and being unable to sleep because you are awakened with ear pain sinus pain or even chest pain several times per night, then you know it’s time to move. But the very idea someone who is not there and or is not allergic to smoke and or vape telling a person who is allergic to simply sleep with a mask on as if that were going to solve the problem, without asking what the situation is and how grave it may be, for example ear pain as in eardrum rupture from previous ear infections that came from sinus infections that came from smoke entering sleeping area, not to mention the simple lack of sleep, which means inability to get work done during the day. Is enough to drive one jump off of a bridge. At 4 in the morning.
-Nia
Context, Thought, and Learning: ShiraDest Offers Project Do Better 
I have a friend who is a nurse and was in a building where the people next door were smoking pot and she had to worry about being randomly tested. Motivated her to buy a house.
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I know people with houses who have tremendous problems with their neighbors, including smoke of various kinds wafting in. Only a large enough house with enough acreage around it will solve the problem, for those who can afford such a home. One should not have to risk one’s health and carreer to live in an apartment or condo.
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Oh, no, not again! I really thought smoking was on its way out in Europe. I read somewhere that vaping is not any better than smoking for the vaping people either. If they have to have the poison, why not use the plasters. At least those do not harm anybody else.
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Exactly. There are patches, with exact doses, and of course there are also oils, edibles, and who knows what other ways of getting the stuff without spreading it to allergic neighbors. I am shocked to see how many young people here in Portugal smoke, especially. So many of my co-workers smoked that one asked me, as she was going out to smoke: “No fumas?” as if she were surprised! And she is only 29 or 30 years old, like the majority at these call center night and day shift jobs, in their twenties, and smoking like chimneys! This country is going to have an enormous public health care problem in thirty to forty years. And absolutely no one has heard of the Smoke Free Generation 2040 initiative by the European Union, which I had read that Portugal was supposed to be supporting and working toward, just before I arrived here. That support for the EU initiative is in name only , as far as I can see, as there is no signage, no educational promotion, nothing, which of course explains why no one has heard of it.
*sigh*
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All these health plans, as well as WHO resolutions are accepted by the Ministers of Health. But, that doesn’t mean that the governments will endorse them. So it is all playing to the gallery. Not worth the paper they are written on. Same with the encironment meeting, zero results, total waste of money and energy.
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Well, I wouldn’t call the resolutions a complete waste of time: they bear witness to the crying need for change in multiple areas. It’s a bit like the Work of a Black woman writer that Toni Morrison spoke of being to bear witness to that which has been ignored: she wrote works that were extremely difficult, emotionally, to read, but that needed to be written, regardless of the outcome. These resolutions and meetings must be held, if nothing more than to remind the world that we can, or at least we could, Do Better.
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I don’t really completely agree with the comparison of the two. The politicians hold the meetings to demonstrate to the world that something is being done, which it isn’t. So, in my eyes it is bearing witness to the fact that we fail again and again, at least at the political level. But then again, maybe that is also a fact worthwhile to be pointed out.
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“The politicians hold the meetings to demonstrate to the world that something is being done, which it isn’t.”
Ah, ok, this is a point that I had not realized. Still, I think that the fact that they feel the need to be seeing doing (or pretending to do) something does also bear witness to the fact that it is an important issue which needs addressing.
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