More Cities Go Smoke-Free
dopesmuglar
According to the American Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation (ANRF), Indianapolis is one of the nineteen most populated cities in the United States that has not enacted a smoking ban that covers all restaurants and bars. This fact may change as the City-County Council of Indiana is currently debating whether to extend the smoking ban, first enacted in 2005, to “bars, bowling alleys, and private clubs.” The Council plans to vote on the ban on November 30. This will be the third time that a stricter smoking ban will be on the City-County agenda.
There are bar owners and customers against the ban in Indianapolis, but according to an article about the ban, Councilman Ben Hunger says that the ban has a 70 percent approval rating and that a smoking ban in Indianapolis is inevitable. Over 70 percent of Americans live in an area with some sort of smoking ban.
Smoking is currently on the minds of many city and state officials. More than 65 percent of St. Louis County voters approved a smoking ban for most public spaces last week. This ban, along with a St. Louis City ban, will take effect in January 2011. Some have criticized the St. Louis County smoking ban because it does not cover smaller bars and casinos. Other cities have gone even further and are looking to extend smoking bans to other interior spaces. Anchorage tops the ANRF list of “Municipalities with Local 100% Smokefree Laws,” and has smokefree workplaces in addition to smokefree restaurants and freestanding bars. Beginning next year, smoking will be banned in Georgia prisons and mental hospitals. Government officials in Georgia are hoping to create healthier environments for inmates, patients, doctors, and visitors and help save taxpayer money spent on smoking related health care costs.
Does banning smoking really affect business revenues? I am not sure and neither are the experts I do know however, that I enjoy being able to walk down a street or into a building without having to breathe in second-hand smoke. According to Tim Zagat of Zagat Survey, a 2006 survey found that 89 percent of all Americans surveyed thought that “smoking should be totally banned in restaurants.” A survey done in Philadelphia in 2006 found that “72 percent said they would dine out the same amount if restaurants were smoke-free, while 25 percent would dine out more. Only 3 percent said they would dine out less.
Issue #20 Launch Party + “Songs of the City” DJ event!
Bob in Chicago. on Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 7:29am
When the anti smoking people were using education, it was very successful at greatly reducing smoking rates. Now that they are reverting to Gestapo snitchlines and law enforcement, there is a backlash effect beginning to become evident..
harleyrider1978 in america on Sat, Nov 14, 2009 at 7:09am
SECOND HAND SMOKE IS A JOKE. Ask the anti-tobacco folks to tell you what truly is in second hand smoke…when it burns from the coal its oxygenated and everything is burned and turned into water vapor…...............thats right water….......you ever burned leaves in the fall…know how the heavy smoke bellows off…....thats the organic material releasing the moisture in the leaves the greener the leaves/organic material the more smoke thats made…...thats why second hand smoke is classified as a class 3 irritant by osha and epa as of 2006….....after that time EPA decided to change the listing of shs as a carcinogen for political reasons…....because it contained a trace amount of 6 chemicals so small even sophisticated scientific equipment can hardly detect it ........they didnt however use the normal dose makes the poison computation when they made this political decision. However osha still maintains shs/ets as an irritant only and maintains the dose makes the poison position…....as osha is in charge of indoor air quality its decisions are based on science not political agendas as epa’s is. We can see this is true after a federal judge threw out the epa’s study on shs as junk science…...... Wednesday, March 12, 2008 British Medical Journal & WHO conclude secondhand smoke “health hazard” claims are greatly exaggerated The BMJ published report at:
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/326/7398/1057
concludes that “The results do not support a causal relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality. The association between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke and coronary heart disease and lung cancer are considerably weaker than generally believed.” What makes this study so significant is that it took place over a 39 year period, and studied the results of non-smokers who lived with smokers…..
meaning these non-smokers were exposed to secondhand smoke up to 24 hours per day; 365 days per year for 39 years. And there was still no relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality. In light of the damage to business, jobs, and the economy from smoking bans the BMJ report should be revisited by lawmakers as a reference tool and justification to repeal the now unnecessary and very damaging smoking ban laws. Also significant is the World Health Organization (WHO) study:
Passive smoking doesn’t cause cancer-official By Victoria Macdonald, Health Correspondent ” The results are consistent with their being no additional risk for a person living or working with a smoker and could be consistent with passive smoke having a protective effect against lung cancer. The summary, seen by The Telegraph, also states: ‘There was no association between lung cancer risk and ETS exposure during childhood.’ ” And if lawmakers need additional real world data to further highlight the need to eliminate these onerous and arbitrary laws, air quality testing by Johns Hopkins University proves that secondhand smoke is up to 25,000 times SAFER than occupational (OSHA) workplace regulations.
The Chemistry of Secondary Smoke About 94% of secondary smoke is composed of water vapor and ordinary air with a slight excess of carbon dioxide. Another 3 % is carbon monoxide. The last 3 % contains the rest of the 4,000 or so chemicals supposedly to be found in smoke… but found, obviously, in very small quantities if at all.This is because most of the assumed chemicals have never actually been found in secondhand smoke. (1989 Report of the Surgeon General p. 80). Most of these chemicals can only be found in quantities measured in nanograms, picograms and femtograms. Many cannot even be detected in these amounts: their presence is simply theorized rather than measured. To bring those quantities into a real world perspective, take a saltshaker and shake out a few grains of salt. A single grain of that salt will weigh in the ballpark of 100 million picograms! (Allen Blackman. Chemistry Magazine 10/08/01). - (Excerpted from “Dissecting Antismokers’ Brains” with permission of the author.)
The Myth of the Smoking Ban ‘Miracle’ Restrictions on smoking around the world are claimed to have had a dramatic effect on heart attack rates. It’s not true. http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7451/
As for secondhand smoke in the air, OSHA has stated outright that: “Field studies of environmental tobacco smoke indicate that under normal conditions, the components in tobacco smoke are diluted below existing Permissible Exposure Levels (PELS.) as referenced in the Air Contaminant Standard (29 CFR 1910.1000)...It would be very rare to find a workplace with so much smoking that any individual PEL would be exceeded.” -Letter From Greg Watchman, Acting Sec’y, OSHA, To Leroy J Pletten, PHD, July 8, 1997
-harleyrider1978