quittin' smoking

[Jeremy David]

Personally, I'm not too worried about main clubs and such reopening as
private venues. It makes it too complicated and convoluted for many
people to just go there, and that cuts into profits.

As a society, we agree that if you want to profit by maintaining
public space, that you have to ensure that the public space is safe
and accessible. There are thousands of laws that back up this idea,
from the Americans with Disabilities Act to the creation of the
Department of Public Health.

The main issue is that for some reason, cigarettes are allowed to
occupy this hazy middle-ground legally. They're drugs, but for some
reason, they're not illegal like other less dangerous drugs. They're
dangerous, but they're allowed in places where things that are half as
dangerous are with good reason banned. I'm sure we all understand that
the tobacco lobby has a lot to do with the reasons why this is. I
think we can only start to have a reasonable civic policy about
cigarettes when we start start to treat cigarettes as what they are, a
dangerous addictive drug which is dangerous not only to the user, but
anyone in the general vicinity.

Anything but some kind of balance here will result in some one's
nightmare scenario. Either we'll have a Nanny State that slaps us on
the wrist for having too much fun, or we have a Drug State that
financially supports drug addiction in the masses. Somewhere in the
middle has to be the best option.

Perhaps the ideal would be something like the "Coffee Shop" culture in
some European cities (primarily in the Netherlands and Germany), where
certain "Coffee Shops" are granted licences to sell not only coffee,
but marijuana, shrooms, tobacco, etc. and to allow people to use them
on the premises. This keeps it balanced. The people who want to go out
to do drugs can do so, but the people who don't want to do drugs still
have plenty of great places to go. Generally how it works out is that
the coffee shops attract people who want to do drugs, and the clubs
etc. attract people who don't want to.

On 3/14/06, Brian J. Parker <brian.j.parker at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/14/06, Jeremy David <epistemology at gmail.com> wrote:
> > If you want to smoke in a private place then please have at it. I have
> > no desire whatsoever to use the power of the state to stop you.
> >
> > But, public places are different. We have all sorts of rules to keep
> > people safe from one another in public places.
>
> What you'll end up with, I fear, is many bars and clubs reopening as
> "private clubs" in the same workaround many already use to circumvent
> more restrictive liquor laws (and often to hide illicit poker
> machines).  Do bar/club owners have the right to say that their
> establishment is not a "public place"?
>
> I don't ahve a strong opinion on the public smoking subject, but I
> feel it's hypocritical that we even keep smoking tobacco (and drinking
> alcohol) legal at all when much safer drugs are not.
>
> B
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