Whoa boy, you took my advocacy of no smoking in bars off the deep end… You seem to link prohibiting smoking in bars to blanket prohibition of smoking, drinking and any other drugs. I never said anything remotely relating to this and I think your reasoning here is specious at best. I think we can all agree that how the netherlands treats heroin addicts is much more preferable than how we treat them. Instead of criminals they are sick patients, that need to goto a clinic every day in order to get their fix. In this way heroin is seen as less cool and gets ostracized in a much better way by their society. Gone is the mystique of operating outside the law and in is the reality that you are simply addicted to something you can’t control (which is pretty shitty). I see making it illegal to smoke in bars in the exact same way. Society is ostracizing smokers as a way to cut down, but not eliminate, smoking. It’s much less cool if every time you want to indulge in your addiction you need to go outside and separate yourself from your friends. And for what?! A little white tube? Smoking is becoming less prevalent in our society and I don’t see why non-addicts should have to bend over backwards to accommodate people that are addicted to nicotine. (remember folks, nicotine is at least as addictive as heroin and much more physically damaging). Are all of you people defending cigarette smokers really advocating we go back to where people could smoke everywhere? Planes, trains, your workplace etc? Is it really so bad that smokers need to go outside to smoke? The free-market argument is also a cop-out. Like communism a real free market system will never EVER exist. The ideas of the free-market need to be blended applicably to other systems to be successful.

One last thing, your Franklin quote is not applicable at all in this situation. A) I wasn’t aware smoking was an essential liberty. B) I wasn’t aware taking it away from bars was making me more secure. Kind of a non sequiter that distracts from what we are debating (although if that is just a signature or something I apologize)

“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security.”
-Benjamin Franklin

Hmm. Maybe you’re not so dumb as you look.

Why can’t I have 1 bar where I can go to smoke? Why can’t I open a business that caters to smokers? If enough people really wanted completely non-smoking bars, the free market would have created them. I suspect now that the law has passed here, if it was repealed some bars would remain non-smoking. Do we need a law for everything we find disagreeable in society?

or have we all decided to ignore stories like this, and their possible implications when implemented by fiat on a national scale, and just hope/change for the best?

You’re really mature! And your constructive criticism shows you are likely the smartest person in this comment section. Why can’t Bill O’Reilly be more like you?

Nothing to see here people. Move along.

I’ve had conversations with educated and presumably intelligent people in San Francisco willing to support any and all cigarette smoking bans at the same time they were smoking pot.

Apologies.

So no, marijuana doesn’t count. It’s the left-wing cigarette of choice.

May we assume, then, that the San Francisco nannies will be re-outlawing sodomy soon?

Just wondering.

Who the fuck is going to protect me from him?

I’m wondering the opposite: Who the fuck is going to protect him from me?

The real No. 1 cause of death is life. How long before they decide to protect us from that?

Actually, it has been proved that “death is caused by swallowing small amounts of saliva over a long period of time.” (George Carlin, PBUH)

It can be found in our constitution right below the part where it guarantees us cheap gas….

That’s funny, I seemed to have missed where this is in the Constitution, the rulebook designed to regulate and restrict our government. I’m sure it must be in there somewhere, else things like this couldn’t happen.
*End Sarcasm*

When the government regulates what the citizenry can do and where they can do it, no matter how small the incident might seem, it’s something to be abhorred. Each one of those incidences is one step away from liberty and one step toward totalitarianism.