TheAgitator.com
Bans and the Banning Banners Who Ban Things, Cont’d
Thursday, November 6th, 2003Ban the Ban DC, an organization of residents opposed to the proposed DC smoking ban, launched its website today. Cool stuff, upcoming events, legislative issues, a weblog, media contacts, interviews with business owners, and more will be available on the site in the coming months.
The founders cite a lack of public discourse about smoking bans as a leading factor in their quick and undebated passage in other cities, and hope that coverage of Ban the Ban will help in other cities too.
I am torn by these smoking bans. I understand that people have the right to CHOOSE to smoke. But their smoking is not “victimless”. I doubt second-hand smoke causes cancer, but it smells bad and makes MY clothes smell bad.
People have a right to drink beer, but we don’t think it is acceptable for beer drinkers to spit their beer on my clothes.
btw, I am an ex-smoker.
But loads of places are smokefree voluntarily. If people really don’t like smoke, why don’t they stop going to places that allow smoking? Why get the government involved?
But people that smoke are often more cool and interesting than people that don’t, so the places that are voluntarily smoke-free are boring.
I want to go to the cool places and hang out with the cool people, but I don’t want to smell bad.
I demand that the government grant me this wish.
How right you are, Dan. Even when I would not want to smoke I’d choose the smoking section when I’d go out to dinner b/c it was usually a more fun envirnoment. Now the bastards have banned smoking everywhere that is not a “bar” (based on food/liquor sales). Somehow they all now seem boring.
But, of course, we are the state that first showed the world Nicotini.
Reason the law passed was money. The cancer associations, etc. dumped more money (think like $1 mill) into the fight than the food industry.
In California, smoking is banned even in bars. Some bars have worked around this problem by restructuring their business as a profit-sharing co-op. If every employees is also an “owner”, then no employee is being forced to work in a smoking environment by their “boss”. They are all “bosses”.
Smokers are more fun because they tend to be a little less inhibited, in my opinion.
Swamp Justice: That was the rule under the NYC smoking ban too. There was an owner operated bar in my neighborhood that was always packed and a lot more fun than its neighbors, and I don’t normally smoke. However, under the NYS smoking ban, that exception was abolished, and those havens disappeared. The NYS ban also screwed NYC businesses by superceding an exception to the NYC ban allowing owners to permit smoking in a separate room with its own ventilation in which no non-owner staff worked. Many bars paid huge sums of money to have such rooms built, only to find them useless 6 months later. I oppose the ban in general, but I find the screwing over of local governance to “strengthen” the ban equally pernicious.