5 Comments

  • May I ask, what’s to prevent a club from calling the police for each occurrence, saying “we think we saw someone smoking, you better get here right away!” If, per the mayor, it’s to be a crime to smoke, then surely the crime should be reported.

    Equally surely, it would be reckless and dangerous for a private organization, in a public space filled with innocent bystanders, to attempt to deprive an addict of his (or her) drug; such delicate matters should be left to trained police officers. The anti-smoking forces have made quite the case for the horrible addictiveness of tobacco, have they not?

  • @ras: That’s a good idea. It would be the only way to truely protect the club against their own inability to get a customer to stop smoking. Until, of course, it becomes legal to use force to stop someone from smoking around you because of the known health issues.

  • Until, of course, it becomes legal to use force to stop someone from smoking around you because of the known health issues.

    I don’t know about your neck of the woods, but where I am from the number of times the police are called out to a club is weighed when granting the club a liquor license.

    So if they call the police, that gets used against them when going to renew their license. If they don’t enforce the non-smoking ban, that gets used against them.

    It is a no win situation for the clubs.

    (Of course, I am of the opinion that if a club or establishment wants to allow smokers, let ’em. If enough people complain or stop going to the club, then the owners will ban smoking. But I suspect that I am in the minority on this.)

  • “Until, of course, it becomes legal to use force to stop someone from smoking around you because of the known health issues.”

    That would be the alleged health issues. I state with no more than anecdotal certainty and common sense, but nonetheless certainty and common sense that if an ordinarily healhty non-smoker is in a night club and another person smokes a cigarette in that same nightclub, no health issues for the non-smoker will arise.

  • As I understand it, smoking itself increases the probability of lung cancer from 1 unit to 20 units; second hand smoke from 1 to 1.3. In neither case is lung cancer a certainty and incidence is in later years. I don’t believe Mayor Bloomberg’s smoking regulations are justified, although as a non-smoker I appreciate my smoke free environment.

    The situation with lead is thousands of times worse. The EPA wants to put in a CPSIA type lead regulation that will increase the cost of replacing a window by $90. We are talking about a minor amount of dust that would be in a house for a day or two at most. Lead is not salmonella, it does not make more of itself. If you start with a tiny amount of lead, it will stay tiny or disappear entirely.