The next Cigar Hunter prize giveaway will conclude on Monday, Oct. 22. Make sure you’re at least 18 years old and registered for the Cigar Hunter email list, and you could win a box of House Resolution by JC Newman cigars and a Thunderbird torch lighter from Corona Cigar Co.
Today’s photographic guest smoker: Cuban emigre and Academy Award-nominated actor Andy García, of “Godfather Part III” and “The Untouchables” fame. Odd trivia: García had parts in the first episodes of both “Hill Street Blues” and “Murder, She Wrote.” Talk about range. He was photographed Friday at the Mission Hills World Celebrity Pro-Am golf event in China.
Am I the only one left who thinks it’s appalling to criminalize adults who want to smoke cigars?
The city of Berkeley, California was the first municipality in the world to restrict tobacco smoking inside restaurants. That was in 1972. At the time, slippery-slope Cassandras warned that eventually the lifestyle police would come for the pipes in our dens and drawing rooms. Cue the guffaws.
But on Monday, just 18 miles away, the fine people of San Rafael upped the ante. The city council there voted unanimously to ban smoking in condos, duplexes, multi-family buildings — basically any private dwelling where you have to share a wall with another homeowner.
Reuters reports that eight other California towns have already taken this step, but San Rafael’s law is the first to cover all multi-family structures — including new construction and old buildings, whether they’re rented or owned.
I’m at once both resigned to the slope becoming more slippery, and surprised that no enterprising California lawmaker has yet argued for bans on tuna salad sandwiches whose offensive odor — to some, anyway — wafts unwelcome from living room to living room. And dill pickles? They’re a menace.
Yes, I know. It’s California, where no bad idea is rendered inert until it’s consumed a hundred times its weight in common sense.
But North Dakota? You don’t normally think of the Peace Garden State — yes, I Googled it — as a haven for nuttiness. Those folks are sandwiched in between Mount Rushmore and the Canadian tundra. It’s not exactly yoga country.
Yet the state has a ballot measure up for a vote on Nov. 6 that would “prohibit smoking, including the use of electronic smoking devices, in public places and most places of employment in the state, including certain outdoor areas.”
Of course, this is about public places, not apartments. But did you catch the bit about “electronic smoking devices”? It’s hard to imagine a rationale for banning e-cigarettes, other than their general Jarvik-heart weirdness or a desire to wipe out the tiniest visual suggestion that someone might enjoy drawing air through something vaguely tubular.
It’s the mentality that has museum curators airbrushing cigars from photos of Winston Churchill, now applied, “Truman Show”-like, to live-action people.
Yes, grown-ups actually write these laws.
In Binghamton, N.Y., a county-wide ban on smoking in public parks has just been extended to cover the parking lots.
Lawmakers in Boulder, Colo. are working on a smoking ban to cover an outdoor pedestrian mall. The only sticking point is whether jail time — yes, a maximum of 90 days in the slammer — is justified for a first offense.
The University of Illinois is poised to ban tobacco campus-wide because it’s a dangerous health risk for students. No word on whether the school’s lucrative football team will disband because of the risk of concussion or broken bones.
Chico, California police will start enforcing a new law next month that bans smoking within 20 feet of any building. Any building at all. Not schools, or hospitals, or Whole Foods stores or gas stations. Any building. The city won’t penalize you, lawmakers say, if you’re just walking down the street and not standing still. We’ll see how long that lasts.
Toronto’s board of health will decide next week whether to ban smoking on outdoor restaurant patios. You know, where people who want to eat out go to smoke.
Montgomery County, Maryland is set to add tobacco smoke to the list of things that can trigger a nuisance lawsuit. “I’d like to get the smoking rate in Montgomery County to zero,” Democratic County Councilman George Leventhal said during Thursday’s meeting of the county’s Health and Human Services Committee. He’s in charge there.
All these stories came just from the past week.
Annoyed enough to take your case to court? Good luck. The Michigan Court of Appeals ruled Oct. 4 against a bar owner who thought the state’s smoking-ban law was unconstitutional. The court never reached that critical question, but threw his case out of court anyway.
Why? The smoking ban drove away so many of his customers that he had to close — rendering the whole legal action moot. “Defendant is now out of business,” the court ruled. “[A]ccordingly, enjoining the ban’s enforcement would not provide him any relief.”
So what to do? You could follow the example of an Omaha, Nebraska pool-hall owner or a host of Lexington, Kentucky strip clubs: Ignore the law, pay the fine.
I find it telling that so many of these smoking bans are passed into law for the stated reason that they will force people to quit on tobacco completely. Someone should explain that to the economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis who discovered in August that it doesn’t work.
“The correlations between smoking bans and the smoking behaviors examined are not quantitatively significant,” economists Michael T. Owyang and E. Katarina Vermann wrote. “In other words, the bans do not generally correlate with fewer people starting to smoke or continuing to smoke. They also do not generally correlate with more people attempting to quit smoking.”
The pair also determined that “enacting smoking prohibitions in indoor workplaces, bars, and restaurants does not appear to increase the likelihood that a current smoker will attempt to quit.”
And frankly, it’s not like fines from enforcing smoking bans are rivaling red-light cameras in terms of municipal revenue generation. So why do we have these bans in the first place?
Simple: They make someone in the public health community feel good. Just like New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg feels good squashing that sneaking feeling that somewhere in the five boroughs, someone is enjoying a giant Big Gulp with salted popcorn.
Public health, remember, was invented to stop epidemics like polio, mumps and syphilis. With most of the 20th century’s big epidemiological killers — aside from AIDS, of course — on the ropes, an entire cottage industry of researchers and bureaucrats had to re-purpose themselves or risk obsolescence.
And now, with every push of their pencils, we’re watching the erosion of basic pleasures, drip by drip, puff by puff, month by month.
Don’t say no one warned you.