Small bars blast proposed smoking ban

I agree 100% with "NoAssemblyRequired" - let adults chose what they want to do. Since when are people so incompetent and incapable of makinf their own life decisions that every possible Choice has to be made for them by the legislature? Pretty pathetic.

Any activity of adults that doesn't infringe on the personal space of others should not be regulated, however, Tobacco smoke does infringe on my personal space. If anyone wants to smoke a smokeless product, that keeps the poisons and carcinogens inside their own body, I say more power to them. Currently Tobacco smoke is not contained in the body of smokers, and I am sick of having to avoid places of business that allow smoking. The sooner smoking is banned in public places in AMERICA, the better.
It's not the personal freedom of the smoker, but that of the person who has to forcibly receive their second hand smoke that is at stake.

NoAssemblyRequired wrote:

A good idea would be for adults be left alone to pursue adult activities.

If you want to go to a smoke-free venue, great go! But why must there only be smoke-free venues? What makes your adult perspective require complete adherence?

I don't smoke - but I have had enough of people that think they can tell me how - AS AN ADULT - I have to behave.

For 46 years I've done just fine...and to celebrate, I just may START smoking.

I think alcohol should be outlawed and the bars turned into smoking pits.

I don't think making all the business places non smoking is going to be good for business. People are not going to go spend money and have to be uncomfortable. If people want non smoking places, open them up and make it clear that it is a non smoking establishment. The smokers can go in their places and the non smokers go in their places and everybody can be happy. I am so tired of all of our rights being taken away from us.

Patricia wrote:

Here's a sign that is hung on a few of the bar walls in town......$500 fine for smoking pot....$5,000 for smoking tobacco...please smoke dope it's cheaper...lol

no that isnt right pot can get high witch can get u put in jail for long long time

Sherry L wrote:

I don't think making all the business places non smoking is going to be good for business. People are not going to go spend money and have to be uncomfortable. If people want non smoking places, open them up and make it clear that it is a non smoking establishment. The smokers can go in their places and the non smokers go in their places and everybody can be happy. I am so tired of all of our rights being taken away from us.

Why is it a RIGHT to put poisons into your body and blow the remains out into the air I have to breath? Rights? You don't have a clue what rights are. Do I then have the right to unplug your sorry ass from the lung machine when my tax dollars are keeping you alive because you were so stupid to smoke? I hope you die a slow gasping death.

L Roe wrote:

Any activity of adults that doesn't infringe on the personal space of others should not be regulated, however, Tobacco smoke does infringe on my personal space. If anyone wants to smoke a smokeless product, that keeps the poisons and carcinogens inside their own body, I say more power to them. Currently Tobacco smoke is not contained in the body of smokers, and I am sick of having to avoid places of business that allow smoking. The sooner smoking is banned in public places in AMERICA, the better.
It's not the personal freedom of the smoker, but that of the person who has to forcibly receive their second hand smoke that is at stake.

<quoted text>

Than go to a non-smoking place of your choice - don't dictate to me what I have to do...no one is forcing you to come into my bar, it's a calculated choice - if you don't like the food, music, or atmosphere, which includes smoking - take your $$ and go elsewhere.
But to think that someone can come into my bar, and then proceed to tell me how I have to change to accommodate them - is insulting and unAmerican.

Don't cram your ideology down anyone else's throat - spend your $$ where ever you want. Leaving me and mine ALONE!

Also to the very small minority of people who smoke (20%to 23%) You are a detriment to our society and I believe that the majority (75%) should rule that if you choose to smoke, you are banned from collecting disability and SS from our government programs.In fact I say put you all on an island like lepers.

Put it up for a public vote! We citizens should be allowed to have our say, too, since it directly affects us. Why should a handful of politicians make this decision FOR us?

One must understand that two things are needed for a bar or restaurant to go out of business:

1. A smoking ban, and;
2. Customers who smoke bailing on the businesses, never to return and spend another dime again.

It's not a smoking ban that causes a business to fail. It's a so-called loyal customer ready to bail in a moment's notice, leaving the bar/restaurant owner, who probably didn't want the ban either, to fend for himself. Way to go, smokers! Don't go outside for a few minutes to smoke, then go back in. No, just leave the business owner to go bankrupt.

JRS9000, so true and so true.
Come on you moron smokers, I am waiting for resonable relpies and comments to my statements.

Come On Folks...
Look - I'm a Libertarian who actually disagrees with my party and supports a ban. Here's the rub - Smokers rights - yes, but what about the other EIGHTY PERCENT of people who don't smoke? I'd support a million and one other things (like legal marijuanna) that doesn't DIRECTLY affect 80% of the population just trying to enjoy a drink or a meal, etc. The fact is - the smoke HAS to go somewhere. One option would be perhaps mandating any bar/restaurant to have adequate smoke handline equiptment that drags the smoke straight up and out of the way of other patrons. But then the bars would want to know who's paying for that.

Again, this is a simple issue - if you don't smoke and you wish to go to a bar and have a drink with some friends, you shouldn't need a gas mask to do so. Majority rules. You can claim you "were fine for 46 years", or that your rights are being trampled, but the fact is, you are choosing to do harm to yourself, and the majority's right to protect themselves from your decision affecting them trumps your right. FL did this when I lived there two years ago, and not only did bars not suffer, but they are doing better - more people who wouldn't go due to the smoke are now going. Smokers have the right to establish "clubs" - where smokers and destroy themselves in peace...

To Brad in OH, and others who claim the Ban hurts business - I added proof to my past statement:
"Clean Air Anniversary Cause for Celebration
Smoke-Free law is good for health and business"

http://www.smokefreeforhealth.org/

It is on a pro-ban website, but the studies it quotes are valid FL statewide studies.

I read the study, but I am sure bars and restaurants in Florida have been hurt. Bars in Canada are all down atleast 20% wherever a ban has been imposed. The bars in Madison, Wisconsin are really suffering.

Smoking Ban Continues to Hurt Bars
5:40 PM Dec 12, 2005

Five months after the smoking ban went into effect in Madison, bar owners blame declining business on the ban.

A spokesman for the Coalition to Save Madison Jobs, who is also a bar owner, says regular customers are no longer coming in and virtually no new customers are replacing them.

That in turn means the ban is actually taking money away from the workers it was designed to help.

In fact, payroll at his bar is down $15,000 because of the slow in business.

Instead of staying in the cities people go to the suburbs where smoking isn’t banned. The suburb restaurants and bars flourish where as the cities bars and restaurants hurt badly. So the restaurant and bar owners have two choices cut the losses and close down their business and move out to the suburbs or to ignore the ban and pay the fine. And the fine is cheaper than it would be to tell their customers to put their cigarette out.

Goodbye FREEDOM! A real America would allow citizens to have a choice, smoking or not. Was Hitler the last to tell people they didn't have a choice?

COLORADO GOVERNMENT FOR SALE!!!
If bars had raised as much money as the casinos to buy the government, there wouldn't be a problem. HOW MUCH DOES IT TAKE TO BUY THE COLORADO STATE SENATE?

Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, etc, I am sorry we have lost what you created!!!

The gentlemen at the end of your note were more interested in securing your right to vote and have not, therefore, lost anything. Vote wisely next time.

As regards your comment on Hitler - I have read Mein Kampf - his views on freedom and smoking were obscure, at best & hardly rate amongst his offenses. Of course, in the view of the world beyond east & west coast of the US, America and Americans are on tricky grounds these days when lecturing on the preservation of freedom.

JLW wrote:

Goodbye FREEDOM! A real America would allow citizens to have a choice, smoking or not. Was Hitler the last to tell people they didn't have a choice?

COLORADO GOVERNMENT FOR SALE!!!
If bars had raised as much money as the casinos to buy the government, there wouldn't be a problem. HOW MUCH DOES IT TAKE TO BUY THE COLORADO STATE SENATE?

Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, etc, I am sorry we have lost what you created!!!

Hitler made a religion out of his hate for smoking. Read the history of the Nazi smoking ban in the British Medical Journal:
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/3...

Are we truly doomed to repeat the past? This excerpt from the British Medical Journal makes me wonder:

NUREMBERG DOCTORS' TRIAL
The anti-tobacco campaign of the Nazis: a little known aspect of public health in Germany, 1933-45
Robert N Proctor, professor of the history of science a

a Department of History, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, United States

Historians and epidemiologists have only recently begun to explore the Nazi anti-tobacco movement. Germany had the world's strongest antismoking movement in the 1930s and early 1940s, encompassing bans on smoking in public spaces, bans on advertising, restrictions on tobacco rations for women, and the world's most refined tobacco epidemiology, linking tobacco use with the already evident epidemic of lung cancer. The anti-tobacco campaign must be understood against the backdrop of the Nazi quest for racial and bodily purity, which also motivated many other public health efforts of the era.

Medical historians in recent years have done a great deal to enlarge our understanding of medicine and public health in Nazi Germany. We know that about half of all doctors joined the Nazi party and that doctors played a major part in designing and administering the Nazi programmes of forcible sterilisation, "euthanasia," and the industrial scale murder of Jews and gypsies.1 2 Much of our present day concern for the abuse of humans used in experiments stems from the extreme brutality many German doctors showed towards concentration camp prisoners exploited to advance the cause of German military medicine.3

Tobacco in the Reich

One topic that has only recently begun to attract attention is the Nazi anti-tobacco movement.4 5 6 Germany had the world's strongest antismoking movement in the 1930s and early 1940s, supported by Nazi medical and military leaders worried that tobacco might prove a hazard to the race.1 4 Many Nazi leaders were vocal opponents of smoking. Anti-tobacco activists pointed out that whereas Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt were all fond of tobacco, the three major fascist leaders of Europe--Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco--were all non-smokers.7 Hitler was the most adamant, characterising tobacco as "the wrath of the Red Man against the White Man for having been given hard liquor." At one point the Fuhrer even suggested that Nazism might never have triumphed in Germany had he not given up smoking.8