I thought the ban applied to all enclosed public spaces? I’ve been to Sweden a few times in the last couple of years and no-one was smoking inside anywhere, whether it was bars, clubs, restaurants or pubs.
ETA: Wiki agrees with this.
Not that I have been to each and every bar or restaurant in Stockholm, but when I ransack my memory I can only come up with three smoking rooms, one of which was a very luxuriously furnished room with glass walls in a pool hall.
A side question: A Polish friend told me that the nicotine was higher in cigarettes here than in her home country. She smoked a lot there, but said she only needed a cigarette or two a day here.
Any truth to that?
What right to smoke in cafes and pubs? Was it ever a right?
I’m trying to work this out- should it be “My right to not get second hand cancer has improved immensely”? Or is it me?
I’m pretty sure that’s what was intended, and I 100% agree.
FWIW, I think a ban on smoking within a certain distance of public buildings would be a good thing. I get that smokers feel put out that they’ve been turfed out into the world (but, hey, tough shit), but a lot of them seem to think this means they have to stand right in the doorway now.
In Russia, restaurants and bars were smoky; other businesses and public buildings weren’t. I sort of remember being asked if I wanted smoking or non in at least one or two places, and there was one little cafe on Dekabristov that was entirely non-smoking. Generally speaking, though, they just sat down an ashtray along with the menu. I don’t remember anyone smoking in the metro stations or on the trains themselves–I guess they’re just another sort of public building, after all. On the “Sibelius” train between Petersburg and Helsinki, second-class cars had comfortable-looking smoking compartments; the first class car just had what amounted to a smoking closet without even a proper chair–just a sort of pad to lean on on one wall, and a low seat that folded out from the other wall. No smoking in the restaurant car. (The first class car’s bathroom was also out of order. But I had an eleven-person compartment to myself, and everything was really pretty smooth and easy. Not a bad way to travel, in general.)
What sorts of public buildings were you in? Just for comparison purposes, not because I doubt you. In Bulgaria, I’ve seen people smoking in schools (not around kids…although I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if there are teachers who smoke in front of their kids) and city hall buildings.
Of course, those are also appropriate places to pull out the vodka and rakia and get smashed in the middle of the day, so cigarette-smoking isn’t really out of line. (Bulgarians are very big on having guests, so if you turn up to city hall in the middle of the day to talk to an official, there’s a good chance s/he’ll call in everyone in the department, pull out some packets of cookies, break out the rakia, and before you know it, your 15 minute meeting is 3 hours long and the office is packed with people smoking and drinking, all of whom are insisting you come to their house for dinner.)
Stores and other businesses, museums, and some university buildings/classrooms. Not government buildings–I managed to largely avoid the famous Russian bureaucracy. (The Bulgarian bureaucracy sounds much friendlier than what I heard of the Russian, by the way. :D)
Oh well, when this sort of thing happened, it wasn’t really for bureaucratic reasons…Bulgarian bureaucracy is a terrible thing. (Lots of standing in line and being made to feel like you’re wasting someone’s time with your sheer existence.) On one occasion, I was just visiting a friend, once it was because I needed to convince my town to contribute some money for a project I was writing a grant proposal for, that sort of thing.
You could smoke in bars in Brussels about a year ago. It could be one of those region-by-region things.
I was going to mention this. I visited Japan recently and it really made me appreciate the smoking ban here in the UK. Like Neptunian Slug, I’d be interested to know what the intention of the OP was here.
No. The amount of nicotine actually inhaled per cigarette varies with cigarette brand, type (ie., light, menthol, longs, etc.) and tobacco type, but not by as much as she makes it sound.
Nearly all mass-produced cigarettes use blends of the three major tobacco types, which keeps flavor and intensity consistent despite variations in batches of tobacco and so on.
The Massachusetts public health department requires that manufacturers test every cigarette (type and brand) for nicotine and tar yields on an annual basis; the results don’t differ that greatly.
Pretty much every cigarette delivers between 0.5 and 2.0 milligrams of nicotine. Unless she went from Marlboro Ultra Lights (low yield) to Newport 100s (high yield), she won’t see that much of a difference - and smokers subconsciously vary their smoking style to increase or reduce nicotine yields anyway. Short puffs result in minimal yields, while long held puffs double or triple the yield.
If your friend isn’t smoking menthols now, and was before, that might account for the difference - menthol inhibits the metabolism of nicotine in the liver, and hence increases the duration of its mind-altering and other effects.
ETA: all that is to say, she might go from five cigarettes a day to two by coming here, but certainly not from, say, a pack a day to two.
My primary intention was to see if the anti tobacco lobby finally caught hold in Europe. It was inevitable but not exactly expected prior to 2000 from my experience with Europeans. It was actually my sense that Europeans are less likely to legislate controls on other peoples behavior despite not having such explicit constitutions controlling governments and their legislation.
I no longer smoke, but I am flabberghasted by the lack of any attempt to accomodate smokers. Why does it require the government to provide pubs and restaurants to be smoke free ? Why does it have to be all or nothing? Why can’t we rely on the free market to provide for non smokers who are even a majority? Non smokers may have been irritated in the past with smoking in bars, so why have they hung out there? Obviously no big deal for them.
Yes, we are socially in transition from acceptance of smoking to fucking people around to discourage a legally accepted practice, but there appears to be no consideration on the part of the politically powerful do-gooders to accomodate.
Given that I’ve been a smoker for damn near 45 years, regreting every cigarette I’ve ever smoked , I still reel from the idea that the social change taking place is directly attributed to government interference in the lives of ordinary citizens.
To really confuse, I’d be quite happy if tobacco was outlawed like marijuana period.
Death by a thousand cuts really sucks.
We were the first part of the UK to permit gays to have civil unions, but the third to introduce a smoking ban.
In Northern Ireland you can smoke in your home, in the open air, in a designated room in care homes, nursing homes and hospices or in a designated bedroom in a hotel, guest house, inn or hostel.
There was a bit of a scare with bars close to the border suggesting they’d lose trade to Irish bars, but I wasn’t sure how that would work with the Irish ban already long in place.
Less likely than who?
I’m curious - what’s relevant about this?
The free market didn’t work in my experience. When restaurants had a choice whether or not to allow smoking, most of them allowed smoking everywhere. Of those that had nonsmoking areas, the smokers lit up anyway, and the restaurant staff were extremely reluctant to do anything about it, to the point where they wouldn’t even say anything to a smoker who lit up in a nonsmoking area and then asked for an ashtray. The smoker got handed an ashtray, in at least half a dozen instances in my experience. I did speak up, and while the food server was a bit sheepish in admitting that yes, it was a nonsmoking area, in most cases the smoker was pissy. What’s more, even if the staff DID say something, there was no law against smoking in a nonsmoking area.
I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a smoker look at a “No Smoking Please” sign, laugh, and light up. Yes, there are some considerate smokers, and I know that I didn’t see them BECAUSE they were considerate. But the rude smokers are the ones who are to blame for the smoking bans these days.
And last month, I passed by a guy who was smoking under the “Tobacco Free Campus” sign of the hospital/clinic that I go to. Was he illiterate, did he think that he was sticking it to The Man, or what? He was by the door of the cardiology unit…
The question does come in to play when it comes to owners rights. I have a friend who owns a bar. He’s currently filing for bankruptcy as nobody wants to go to his bar any more. Mainly because there is another bar about three miles down the road in a different juristiction that doesn’t have a ban on smoking.
And the real kick in the nads is that he even lost a good some of his NON-smoking customers because all of their drinking buddies are hanging out at the smoking bar. :smack:
It’s a BULLSHIT law.