Where There’s Not Smoke
Posted on | July 3, 2006 at 5:11 pm | 4 Comments
This past Saturday, the Colorado indoor public smoking ban went into effect at last. Ah, glorious, glorious smoking ban. Yeah, as I blogged before, I’m not all that sure that this restriction of civil liberties is a good thing. But hot damn, it’s been so nice to go into bars and restaurants and not come out smelling all stinky. Not to mention the health benefits.
BTW, here’s a little video I uploaded to YouTube of a hailstorm at my house on June 24th. The hail is not all that noticeable in the video, but it was definitely there. It was near golf ball size, but they were actually pretty soft and splattered on impact. So there wasn’t a lot of damage.
Latre.
Comments
4 Responses to “Where There’s Not Smoke”
July 4th, 2006 @ 9:05 pm
ooohhhhhh…..splattery!
July 5th, 2006 @ 1:22 pm
Me, I’m fond of firing my gun in public places. I mean, I don’t put bullets in it, so it’s not as if anyone’s gonna get hurt. I just like the noise and the smoke. But the damned gummint just loves to restrict my civil liberties – bastards!
July 5th, 2006 @ 6:23 pm
I hear what you’re saying. I guess I just don’t quite understand: why shouldn’t a tavern be able to declare itself as a “smoking-only tavern”? A place where non-smokers are not welcome and are warned away. That way, the small bars that derive most of their income from smokers could still say afloat. Hey, they did an exemption for casinos, so it just doesn’t seem fair.
July 5th, 2006 @ 10:33 pm
It’s an interesting question. The problem would be, I’m thinking, if all bars essentially used this as a strategy to avoid anti-smoking laws (and thereby endanger the public health of anyone who wanted to earn relatively decent money as a bartender, or anyone who wanted to go to any bar…since they’d all be “smoking clubs”). I know the argument probably runs, well let the market decide…but it isn’t really a free market, since a bar is a smoking bar even if only one person out of fifty there is smoking (this from direct experience). And bars are afraid that all the smokers would just go elsewhere. Which is why local-only restrictions might, arguably, be a bad idea – whereas statewide ones make more sense. I think it’s difficult, because smoking is generally accepted, to see the ways in which allowing a harmful activity in public is in most other situations understood to be generally endangering, and therefore restricted. I mean, you could argue that a private business should be allowed to let rats run around the kitchen, so long as anyone who asks, hey, are there rats in the kitchen? receives an honest answer – since people can always go somewhere else, and people who don’t care about rat-shit in their pancakes should be “allowed” to eat them – even if they get sick (and cost public resources in so doing – another aspect of this situation not often talked about). But since there is no organized “Hey, I like being in restaurants with rabid diarrheac rats!” contingency, the idea seems absurd. The principal, though, is pretty similar. That is, it’s a public health issue – under the principal that behaviors that endanger public health can legitimately be prohibited or restricted, even if people otherwise would voluntarily expose themselves to them. And smoking does this far more directly than bad behavior arising from excessive drinking, or heart attacks from overeating, etc.