Archives for the 'smoking ban' tag
Quick Bites
Local British government councils now handing out rewards–at taxpayer expense–for such accomplishments as brewing a cup of tea. Yaaaaayyy! [Sun]
I was informed the other day, while walking on a sidewalk with a cigarette in hand on the University of Arkansas campus, that such an act–or chewing tobacco–is subject to a $500 fine. That’s smoking. Outside. Not near any person or building. $500. I need me one of these.
Locavorism. A movement inspiring people to travel thousands upon thousands of miles for the purpose of eating a locally grown dinner. And this is better because…? [MSNBC]**
New energy drink Simply Cocaine attacked by UK anti-drug zealots for being named after illegal drug. Ever heard of Coca-Cola, dude? [Sun]
D’Artagnan’s Ariane Daguin remembers Julia Child. [D'Artagnan]
Food & Wine is looking for America’s best home cook. [F&W]
Support Whole Foods, just like “Radney” Balko does at The Agitator.
**Link fixed.
Texas trans fat blues
This is a bad week for consumer freedom in my native Texas (where, incidentally, I enjoyed two chicken fried steaks, barbecue lunches, a Tex-Mex feast, several bottles of Shiner, and Dublin Dr Pepper this weekend). The statewide smoking ban looks very close to passing and the Senate is considering a bill to ban trans fats from restaurants. The AP lists the exceptions included in the latter bill:
But, fearing a backlash from the sweet tooth lobby, the lawmakers provided an exemption for trans fats used to make cakes, pies and other bakery items.
“The icing exemption,” is what Democratic Sen. Eliot Shapleigh called the loophole, explaining that cake icing doesn’t stay put without the hydrogen pumped into the oil – the very process that makes trans fats unhealthy.
Other exemptions were provided for food served by grocery stores, fire departments and certain caterers, and the ban would be slowly phased in. Initially, it would impact only chain establishments. It would apply to all Texas restaurants by late 2011.
Another loophole – for nonprofit organizations – was inserted in part to ensure that corn dogs and other fried goodies served at rodeos and state fairs could still be cooked with trans fat.
And, of course, consumers could still by entire tubs of shortening at the grocery store if they’re in the mood. All of which shows the absurdity of this ban. If trans fats are a dangerous toxin, they shouldn’t be allowed at state fairs or catering events. But they’re not toxins. They’re just another food ingredient, and there’s no justification for forbidding restaurant chefs to use them when they’re readily available elsewhere.
If the Texas legislature insists on doing something about trans fats, it should follow the lead of San Francisco. The city allowed restaurants to apply for seals certifying them to be trans fat free, thus preserving choice and giving consumers the information they might wish to know. Unfortunately, that sensible idea was made irrelevant by California’s statewide ban.
Bans snuff out more than cigarettes
One more post about smoking bans and then I’ll move to actual food. Or maybe drinks. But first, this:
Yet as wonderful as the beer is at the Horse Brass, its community revolves around something more: smoking. The bar is notorious among non-smokers for its tobacco haze and its brown walls and ceiling, which people swear were once white. For those who enjoy tobacco, the Horse Brass is a welcome sanctuary in a city where many businesses are already smoke-free. It’s easy to light a cigar, strike up a conversation, and make new friends. Unfortunately, I had only three months to feel at home here: The state legislature decreed that on January 1, 2009 all bars and restaurants in the State of Oregon had to become smoke-free.
That’s from my article at Doublethink today about my favorite bar in Portland and how its culture has been wiped out by the nanny statists in Salem and their brand new smoking ban. At a bar like the Horse Brass, you either get it or you don’t. The busybodies in the state legislature clearly don’t.
An Oregon smoking ban prediction
I’m supposed to be in Houston right now. Yesterday my bags were packed and, despite being skeptical that my plane home would depart on time, I trudged my luggage through the freshly fallen snow to the train that would take me to the airport. The train wasn’t running. I checked my phone and now neither was my flight. Thirty minutes on hold with Southwest booked me a new ticket on the 24th and three more days in a paralyzed city.
This is all mildly inconvenient for me, but it’s hell for people in the service industry. December is a vital month for them. Because of the record snowfall — the highest for a Portland December since 1968 — my bartender friends are being told not to come into work. Many places aren’t opening at all. Companies are canceling their Christmas party reservations, taking with them all the revenue they’d promised. Combine this with the national recession and 2008 is turning out to be a glum year for area bars and restaurants.
What does this have to do with smoking bans? Oregon’s goes into effect on January 1. By January 2010, the economic uncertainty we’re facing now will hopefully have subsided. And unless it’s another freak year for weather, December will bring its usual boost to Oregon restaurants. If that happens, smoking ban proponents will be able to cite statistics showing that bar and restaurant business went up after the smoking ban, “proving” that they were right and we who oppose the ban had nothing to worry about.
A similar dynamic played out in New York City in March, 2004, a year after the beginning of its smoking ban. The city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene issued a report showing that the bar and restaurant business had grown in the year following the ban. Critics countered that the study misleadingly conflated bars and restaurants and neglected to account for the economic recovery following the 9/11 attacks.
Who’s right? I don’t know and I don’t care. As I’ve said before, this is a stupid argument. The financial objections to smoking bans aren’t based on how they affect net hospitality industry revenues, but on how they impact individual smoking-oriented businesses. Generalized statistics obscure the impact on bars that can’t get an exemption, lose customers, and justifiably feel like their rights are being trampled upon. It’s cold comfort to tell them to suck it up because, well, at least their competitors are making money.
If 2009 is a decent year for Oregon’s bars and restaurants, I predict that this is the kind of claim we’re going to hear from local ban supporters. I’d like to go on the record now to point out that such crude analysis should be seen for the irrelevant BS it truly is.
First they came for the cigarette smokers
Today the Boston City Council approved its measure banning the few remaining smoke-friendly businesses in the city. How bad is the new ban? Here’s City Councilor Michael Ross and restaurant owner Lydia Shire writing in the Boston Herald against it:
In these difficult times every small business is important. There are but six cigar bars in Boston, all of which undergo an annual local licensing process, exhibiting that 60 percent of their sales are from the sale of tobacco-related products and that the appropriate signage reflecting the risks of tobacco use is visible.
All six small businesses will be shut down if the regulations are passed as written. Even if these regulations are altered to temporarily grandfather in these six establishments, it is not reasonable to ask small business owners to maintain their significant investment in their communities, only to be shut down despite their commitment to be good businesses and neighbors.
They also note that the ban will extend to outdoor seating areas, unfairly punishing business owners who invested in patios to comply with the original smoking ban four years ago. Ross and Shire deserve full credit for opposing this rampant paternalism. Yet they’re a little late to the party. Note that they both support the earlier ban on smoking in bars and restaurants; they’re only stepping up now because they’re among those “who care to enjoy the pairing of a cigar and a glass of wine following dinner at one of Boston’s excellent restaurants.” Well la dee dah. If they’re not willing to be equally vigorous in their support of the property rights of sports bar owners or smokers who want to have a cigarette while they take in a music show, they have no right to be surprised when the city steps in to take away their precious postprandial maduros. The difference in the new ban and the original is one of degree, not of principle, and this is exactly the sort of thing we libertarians warned governments were heading towards when the original, less restrictive bans came into force. Now they expect city councils to draw a line protecting elitist cigar smokers like themselves? Give me a break. (And I say this as a fellow elitist cigar smoker.)
There is one interesting wrinkle though. The cigar and hookah bar ban was amended to not go into effect for ten years, with the possibility of one ten year extension after that. Twenty years is a long time, perhaps long enough for cooler heads to prevail; for now it lets the council look tough without actually hurting the businesses. Even so, how sickening is this excerpt from the AP report?
Roger Swartz, who heads the commission’s community initiatives bureau, said the panel lengthened the grace period for the bars because of hard economic times.
“We wanted to give them a bit more time to get used to the idea that they’ll have to close,” Swartz said.
Oh, how very nice of you Roger. You say that as though the bars’ closing was an inevitable event delayed only by the grace of Boston’s benevolent politicians, when you in fact are the ones driving them out of business. How does a person become so self-righteous that they can take credit for protecting small businesses on the same day they forbid their existence?
Today the Boston Public Health Commission justifies the slippery slope arguments made by property rights defenders many years ago. We were told that we shouldn’t worry, that the smoking bans in bars and restaurants were reasonable, and that sufficient accommodations for smokers would be made. Now we see that no ban is strict enough for the public health nannies, that even six cigar bars in a city of more than 600,000 people is too many. The regulators will, perhaps, finally overreach and create a backlash, but by then much of the damage to business owners will be done.
[Hat tip: The Stogie Guys.]
Smoking Inside, Er, Outside the Beltway
I have a piece up today at Culture 11 on how businesses can (and cannot) get around DC & Maryland smoking bans.
Speaking of DC & Maryland, did anyone else notice that NBC kept referring to Sunday night’s NFL game between the Redskins and Ravens as the “Battle of the Beltway”?
And which beltway would that be? 695?
I digress. A snip:
Perhaps the most egregious and subjective requirement of the waiver form is that a filer ordain whether “any like business opened or changed operations in” a waiver seeker’s “general vicinity” since January 1, 2005. (If yes, the applicant must provide an explanation.) For good measure, the application elsewhere describes a “change in operations” as “including, but not limited to a change in chef, manager, wait or other staff.”
In other words, in order to provide a complete response, a waiver applicant must ostensibly survey every nearby competitor to learn the intimacies of their staffing for the previous several years. Of course, a business owner has neither the obligation nor the incentive to aid his competitor.
More here.
German High Court Sides Against Smoking Ban
Europeans have always been known as smokers, and Europe their happy bastion. That latter reputation has, of course, suffered mightily over the last 5-10 years, as countries from France to Ireland have limited or banned smoking in restaurants and bars.
Is this nannying tide against smoking an overwhelming inevitability? Maybe. But as events in Germany indicate, there may be a sliver of reason to hope not.
Germany’s top court upheld complaints Wednesday against anti-tobacco laws in two states, in a ruling with broad implications for a country once seen as a smokers’ paradise.
The Federal Constitutional Court said clauses of laws in the city-state of Berlin and the southwestern region in Baden-Wuerttemberg were unconstitutional because they threatened the livelihood of owners of small bars and clubs.
The six-to-two ruling means that customers in one-room bars and discotheques in the two states can keep lighting up until at least the end of 2009.
More here. Small steps in the right direction closer to home here.
Amy Winehouse Stamps Out Cigarette on Own Face at Restaurant
I’m totally canceling my dinner reservations with Amy Winehouse, who apparently used her face to stamp out a cigarette last week, The Sun reports.
The gross piece of self-harming came in front of stunned diners in a London restaurant.
The troubled star was with pals when she was asked THREE TIMES by staff to put out her Marlboro Light because of the smoking ban.
As she received her final warning, Amy stared straight into the waitress’s eyes and pushed the burning tip of the fag into her own face.
A source at the diner said: “She hardly flinched because she was so high. The whole place was open-mouthed in horror.”
Nice! Crispy previously noted Ms. Winehouse’s sprint for McNuggets sauce here.
