A year or two before I moved to Colorado, California bit the bullet and banned most indoor smoking, including in bars and restaurants. It was something that was very quick and easy to get used to, such that it was a mild shock when I got here and was asked, “Smoking or Non” when I entered a restaurant.
Now Colorado looks to be catching up.
The House gave final approval to a statewide smoking ban today and sent the bill to Gov. Bill Owens, who is expected to sign it. The measure would outlaw smoking in most public places except casinos, cigar bars and the smoking lounge at Denver International Airport. The House approved the measure 38-24. […] The Senate approved the plan Thursday.
Colorado would be the 13th state to enact such a ban. Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman signed that state’s anti-smoking legislation Thursday.
Huzzah.
To be sure, this is one I feel philosphically dubious about. Ideally, this would be handled by the free market, and, given that cigarette smoking is not illegal, etc., etc., blah, blah, yadda, yadda.
But. y’know what? I’ll be glad to be that much more removed from smoking. And I am not going to lose any sleep over this. At all. So there.
(Casinos?)
The State of Washington in November passed a total smoking ban that includes a restriction for smoking with a 25 foot radius of any door. It’s been interesting to witness.
All three schools where I have taught since arriving in Colorado prohibit smoking inside their buildings. No free market is going to stop smoking in public facilities like schools, so I’m very glad that schools have prohibited smoking indoors.
That said, getting indoors sometimes requires that one pass a gantlet of smokers standing outside the doors of a building. It’s pretty disgusting to have to walk through the smoking zone to get into my office or into a building where I’m teaching. All three schools have policies saying how far from a door one must be in order to smoke, but these policies are widely violated by students (and sometimes faculty) on all three campuses. One school’s policy says “five steps” from the door. I think this was a serious mistake, since students often will take five itty-bitty steps from the door. And, as one might expect from college students, if one should be so gauche as to point out that they are violating the policy, the responses are either obscene insults or blank stares.
Fort Collins has had an ordinance prohibiting smoking indoors for about a year now, and many bar and restaurant owners regard it as a serious economic hardship. They say they’re doing considerably less business than they did before the city ordinance went into effect. They’re glad about the statewide ban since they think they will no longer be at a competitive disadvantage to the bars and restaurants that are outside the city limits. I’m not sure why the bars and restaurants have done less business since the ban took effect. Perhaps people who smoke go out more, and perhaps they spend more. The city ban hasn’t had much effect on how frequently I dine out or where I go, but I dine out relatively infrequently.
I’m not sure that a free market can handle this kind of problem effectively. Historically, I think free markets tend to ignore public safety and workplace safety. Like you, ***Dave, I’m selfishly glad that I don’t have to worry about smokers in restaurants or bars, but I do worry about the unforseen consequences of such a law, possibly including the kind of disrespect for the law illustrated by the student smokers I encounter, and possibly including serious financial hardship for those whose main clientele are smokers.
Maybe Colorado isn’t catching up, if California is moving forward, as this article seems to suggest.
Hi Dave — mostly a lurker here, but I reach your blog daily to just see the interesting items you post. First time poster.
My wife and I honeymooned in Ireland last summer, where they have a national ban on indoor smoking, including bars. I’d never really had an opinion about (non-smoker myself) though my part of the country (DC Metro-area of Maryland) seems to be constantly passing and retracting such bans.
But, it was NOTICABLE nicer going out in Ireland. We really enjoyed it, and it didn’t appear to affect the number of patrons for those businesses. All in all, I would now support these bans, having experienced firsthand how much nicer it makes evenings out.
Cheers!
Tony
I think the argument is that, if X can’t go more than an hour or two without need a cigarette, and if X can’t smoke in the comfort of the bar/restaurant, X will not go there.
To my mind, this is indicative of the evil addictiveness of cigarettes, but that’s neither here nor there.
The idea, in theory, is that customers would choose, and their demand would drive the supply provided. So if smokers refused to dine anywhere they could not smoke, and non-smokers refused to dine anywhere others were smoking, we would end up with a small number of restaurants catering to smokers and most restaurants being non-smoking (based on the number of smokers in the population).
It doesn’t work that way, unfortunately. Either non-smokers are not as demanding, or they’re less willing to turn around and leave if they discover a place allows smoking, or perhaps such departures are lost future business (“I’ll never go back there again”) rather than lost present business (“As soon as they saw there was smoking here, they left”) and so is less visible to the restauranteurs.
Indeed, I believe the California experience was that once the playing field was level, it all evened out. If some smokers simply declined to dine out, some folks who were sensitive to smoke began to dine out again. Smokers adapted, and all was right with the world. (That much of California has clement weather, such that it’s usually not a hardship to step outside to smoke may have helped).
I think that level of law is probably too harsh. Second-hand smoke outside would seem to be a best a minor annoyance and far too quickly dispersed to be a serious health hazard. And as the laws become more extreme, (un)civil disobedience of them becomes more extreme.
I think the Calabasas law crosses over the (current) line.
From the sound of the article I noted earlier, I’d agree with you that the Calabasas ordinance is probably too strict. But at the same time I have seen smokers being just as inconsiderate of others outdoors as indoors, and in some cases cigarette smoke doesn’t disperse quickly enough when outdoors. I can think of two examples. One is outside the Eddy building at CSU, where large crowds of smokers like to congregate near the doors of the building. The crowd there is sometimes so big that even if they’re obeying CSU’s rule requiring them to be 25 feet from the door, there’s no way to get in the building without breathing their second-hand smoke. The other example is restaurants with an outdoor patio where smokers eat in order to be able to smoke during their meal. Non-smokers have to put up with the cigarette smoke while entering the restaurant through the patio or if they want to eat outdoors. I don’t know what motivated the Calabasas City Council to enact their ordinance, but it seems to me there are cases where outdoor smoking is a problem. Unfortunately, we can’t legislate people to be considerate of others. I predict that there will be a number of different approaches to controling outdoor smoking before one that strikes the right balance is found.
When I travelled in Ireland on business a number of years back, the pub smoking didn’t overly bother me — it was just part of the atmosphere (metaphorically as well as physically), and went well with many, many Guinnesses.
That said, if they’ve managed to eliminate the smoke, more power to ’em.
More on the Calabasas law.
Owens indicates he’ll sign the Colorado ban.
If you want to trade stories about smoking in foreign lands, let me tell you about dinner on New Year’s Eve in the Canary Islands, which are Spanish territory. My parents and I were at the middle table in the room, with tables all around us. At every other table, there were multiple lit cigarettes sitting in ashtrays in front of the diners. The diners would alternate eating a couple of bites and taking a couple of puffs. The room was very smoky, and pretty foul. In retrospect, I kind of wish I had left the room, but it would have been rude to my parents and would have created a problem in finding someplace to eat our New Year’s Eve dinner on very short notice. I expect every other place nearby had the same problem too. If dining in the US was this bad, I might never go out to dinner.
New York passed the smoking ban in bars and restaurants a few years ago, and it’s been great. And I say that even living directly upstairs from a bar. The traces of smoke that drift up through my open window from the smokers standing outside a bar is much more easily dealt with than the overwhelming cloud of smoke that used to hang in bars.
I’m not saying the smoky pubs were palatable per se, and certainly my clothing (and body) all smelled hellish the next morning — but multiple pints are great for dealing with the immediate discomfort.
Perhaps if smoking bars offered free drinks …