With so many smokers in recent years trying to sue the tobacco manufacturers because they voluntarily smoked cigarettes, could the tables be about to turn on them? Recently a story came out about a woman who is suing the owner of the townhouse where she lived and her neighbor next door in the town house. She claims that the smoking neighbor caused tobacco smoke to come through into her apartment and made her seriously ill and ruined some of her belongings.

This is not really that unheard of. If a smoker can be sued by a neighbor in the apartment next door, what about grown children who might want to sue their parents for smoking in the home with them all of their lives? What about an ex-spouse a smoker might have smoked around for years? What about a business owner being sued by former employees because he allowed smoking in the workplace?

This is really opening up a new can of worms for those smokers who wanted to blame their cigarette addiction on the tobacco companies. Now it seems that they might have to bear the burden of their own responsibility in being thoughtless enough to smoke around other people and harm them when they already knew they were harming themselves. Many smokers have thrilled at the prospect of being able to sue the tobacco companies and place the blame for their addiction on someone else, but how are they going to feel when they are the ones that end up in the court room with everything they own or have on the line?

Of course, the laws have changed to a certain extent as to where people are allowed to smoke and not smoke, but that might not change the fact that they could be sued by those they smoked around before. It really is only fair after all. When children have been trapped in the home with smoking parents, those parents knew that secondhand smoke was deadly too. It might not be the best thing for a child or grown child to sue a parent that smoked, but that is just the way things roll these days.

The best thing for a cigarette smoker to do now is to protect themselves, if not from the tobacco, at least from the possibility of being sued in the future by not smoking anywhere near anyone that could be inclined to sue them later. Being sued because you smoked around someone for a long period of time might seem a little far fetched, but you never know when it could come back to haunt you.