Los Angeles City Council Set to Ban Smoking
If you want to smoke a cigar in LA you better do it quickly because the LA City Council is working on a way to basically ban smoking in their “great” city. From the LA Times:
Councilman Tom LaBonge, chairman of the Arts, Parks, Health and Aging Committee, said it was getting easier to enforce the smoking bans because of cooperation by restaurant owners.
“The patrons are really demanding it,” LaBonge said after his committee directed city lawyers to draft the ordinance Wednesday. “One day we’ll be an absolutely smoke-free world as we move forward, but people still enjoy it, so we’re still allowing it.”
If the patrons are “really demanding it” then why don’t they patronize some other establishment? There are many great restaurants in LA where smoking is not allowed so why not go to those restaurants? The reason why they don’t just take their business somewhere else is because Councilman LaBonge is lying here.
It’s not an outright lie like you or I can tell. He is telling a politician’s lie. I’m positive that some people are complaining about the smoke just as I’m positive that many are complaining about not being allowed to smoke. But this councilman has a vendetta. Just like so many crusading nanny staters out there he has an easy cause: destroy smokers.
He and the rest of the smoke Nazis have convoluted the debate to make it solely about the “health of children.” I guess that’s why smoking isn’t allowed in bars – because the children might, might what exactly in a bar? “Never mind the facts,” the crusading councilman will say, “we are banning smoke in the off chance that some poor kid, who’s just trying to get a splendid public education, will come across one of these dirty animal smokers and breathe in some second hand smoke and die the next day.”
What’s even sadder about this is that those who have the most to lose from a smoking ban, restaurant and bar owners and cigar merchants, are acting like whipped puppies. Some more from the story:
Officials from the California Restaurant Assn. and several cigar groups said Wednesday that they were concerned about the original proposal but were satisfied after negotiations that led to the exemption for age-restricted venues like bars and cigar bars.
“We were able to work with them on a compromise, which makes it so you can’t smoke on the patio of a Chili’s, but if you’re going to a nightclub at midnight on a Friday and it’s age-restricted, smoking would be allowed,” said Michael Hugh Dougherty, an area sales manager for Fuente & Newman Premium Cigars. Dougherty addressed the committee Wednesday.
What a brave man Mr. Dougherty is. Bravo sir! Why don’t you just bundle up your cigars and put them on the street so the crusading LA Council can hack them up? It would be a wonderful photo op for them, they would get to look like prohibitionists did in those black and white film strips when they hacked up barrels of alcohol. And you wouldn’t have to stand up for your livelihood or your (and our) rights any longer.
This is the thing I just don’t get. People who make a living off of selling cigars and/or a place to smoke are more likely to work for a “compromise” and die off slowly than they are likely to fight back. Yes, I am aware of some groups that are fighting back – I actually link to one, Cigar Rights of America – but that’s not enough anymore. If those who profit from the sale of tobacco products are content with a slow death than there isn’t much hope for us cigar smokers.
I’m going to close by re-quoting the councilman:
“One day we’ll be an absolutely smoke-free world as we move forward, but people still enjoy it, so we’re still allowing it.”
If you thought that their goal was to just “protect the children” or some other high and mighty calling then you’re fooling yourself. The endgame for smoking is total prohibition. Ask this guy and he’ll tell you that all cigars are good for is killing you and, in his little world, they should be banned. Is this the America that you want?
Smoking Ban Threatened in Virginia
Gary Pesh, the incoming president of the International Premium Cigar & Pipe Retailers Association, recently made some comments defending the right of bar and restaurant to be smoke-friendly establishments in the state of Virginia (living in Southern California, I’m kind of surprised that there are any such places left in the “Free World”). Here are some of his comments:
“No less an independent economic authority than the Federal Reserve Bank has concluded that smoking bans, wherever they occur, hurt businesses, especially bars and restaurants. Their findings include studies based on data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics regarding areas impacted by legislated smoking bans that found ‘statistically significant employment declines at bars, with loss estimates in employment ranging from four percent to 16 percent’.”
And here’s some comments from Chris McCalla, the IPCPR legislative director:
“The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is charged with protecting the well-being of employees in the workplace, has established secondhand smoke standards well above the range which might be found in any bar or restaurant,” McCalla said.
“In fact, secondhand smoke air quality testing in such workplaces conducted by the American Cancer Society shows typical secondhand smoke concentrations up to 25,000 times safer even than those already-liberal OSHA standards. And testing by the prestigious Oak Ridge National Laboratory confirms that results of air quality testing of secondhand smoke in bars and restaurants was ‘considerably below limits established by OSHA’,” he said.
My God. Even in Virginia we are fighting a losing battle. Wherever we turn we are hounded like some kind of monster. The only thing that separates us from Frankenstein is that instead of pitch forks the villagers are threatening us with taxes, regulations, and eventual prohibition. Ain’t it great living in the last beacon of freedom on this planet?
Boston Could Outlaw Cigar Bars by Thursday
Boston has a long history of civic disobedience; the Boston Tea Party and Abolitionism being two examples. Boston also has a history for crushing its inhabitants’ rights: the second-class status of the Irish around 1900 and a major crackdown on entertainment deemed uncouth during the mid-twentieth century.
Right now Boston is experiencing a revival of both the rebel and the authoritarian. On the rebel side you have cigar bar owners protesting and writing letters to their mayor, Thomas Menino, pleading with him not to outlaw their businesses. Boston already has outlawed smoking in bars and restaurants and now the have their sights set on outlawing smoking in cigar bars.
On the authoritarian side is the city’s Boston Public Health Commission. They have already preliminarily voted to ban smoking in cigar bars and all they have to do is officially pass the law tomorrow.
But don’t worry, Mayor Menino has said that he might intervene:
“I understand they’ve been there for a while and I want to work with the cigar bars,” Menino told The Boston Globe in an interview. “I cannot during these tough economic times prevent them from doing business.”
Boston Commission Nears Final Vote on Ban – Cigar Aficionado
Great, so the only thing saving the cigar bars is the fact that we’re in a recession. All I’ve got to say is that if you like going to cigar bars in Boston you should go as much as you can right now because sooner or later – probably sooner – you won’t have the option.
No Cigar Smokers Allowed!
It’s just a cold, hard truth of life. One of the things we love to do, smoke cigars, is banned most places we go. Our cigars just are not allowed.
Restaurants. Once there was once a time when we could have a nice meal, drink some wine, and then have a cigar after dinner. Some places actually had humidors on site for you to pick from. While I assume that there are still places like this (know of any?) the norm today is for restaurants to just ban cigar smoking.
Bars. This one is the most troubling for me. Drinking and smoking go hand in hand. I’ll have some Wild Turkey and I just automatically go for a cigar. Not any more. You go out and all you can do at a bar is shoot pool, talk, our listen to crappy music someone else picked out.
Car. I live in California, so this may not be the case for you. But if I were to be driving with a minor, someone under 18, I would be pulled over by the cops. It is illegal to smoke with your own kid in the back seat! (I don’t have kids so I haven’t ran into this problem… yet.)
Any Building. It’s not just in the building but, where I am going to school, Cal State Fullerton for my MBA, you cannot smoke within 20 feet of a building. I guess smoke is considered akin to a heat seeking missile looking for its next victim.
What all of these places have in common is that they were legislated into this madness. The government decided that having a little secondhand smoke was just too much of a risk for innocent passersbys. This is so much crap.
Does secondhand smoke kill? Sure. If you have a cloud of smoke circling around you 24/7 for forty years, it will kill you – we are told. I’ve been around secondhand smoke my whole life and I was able to play sports. I don’t have any health problems at all. I’m still alive.
I do have to admit, however, that secondhand smoke probably does have some adverse affects. What about car exhaust?
This is where the “ban smoking” argument crumbles. According to our alarmist government and every other international and intergovernmental organization, our world is coming to a quick end because of car exhaust and other carbon emitters. Now, I don’t know about you, but wouldn’t the end of humanity trump secondhand smoke? But cars and other polluters are allowed to go on. Why not us?
These jerks in government just hate you and I and they want to regulate our pastime out of existence. Before that time happens, however, they will just try to tax us to death. Our friends who smoke cigarettes know all about that and we came perilously close to succumbing to their same fate with SCHIP. How many of us would have had to stop enjoying cigars if that tax hike had passed? Most all of us would have had to cut back at least.
Alright, that’s our friendly government at work but there is one other place most of us can’t smoke. I bet you thought I had forgotten about this one.
Home. Home may be where the heart is but no smoke can be found there. We are booted out into the frequently inhospitable outdoors to smoke our cigars. While the weather is usually good to me it is not so kind to many of you.
And maybe this represents the crux of our ostracism. If we cannot smoke at home how can we expect to be allowed to smoke outside of the home? To put it another way, if we cannot get those who love us to permit our indoor cigar smoking how can we convince those who do not know us? We can’t.
What all of this is leading to is a generation of cigar smokers, you and me, out in the wilderness. We are heading for a day when we are going to have to get our cigars delivered to us in nondescript bags, just like those guys who get playboy in manila folders. Basically, we are lepers.
I am usually an optimistic person. I still hold out hope that one day I will be allowed to take my Fuentes out into public and smoke them amongst the people. But, from where I sit today, I just don’t see that day being anytime soon. Do you?
