quittin' smoking

[Chris Rapier]

Last notes on this. I'm not going to reply to further comments. This
is just too engrossing and I need to get some other shit done today.

1) Smoking is bad for you. This is undeniable.
2) Passive smoking can be bad for you.
3) No one should *force* you to breathe smoke like that. In most cases
though no one is actually forcing you to breath the smoke. They
aren't. You are in a club. You chose to go there. No one made you.
Since you made the choice to go to a club where smoking is legal then
you cannot argue that you were forced into it. Therefore, at this
point, it because a matter of who is more personally inconvenienced.
You don't have to go to that show, you don't have to go to that club.
You might like to, but no one is making you. Likewise no one has to
smoke at that club and no one has to smoke at that show. As such I
find the health impact diversionary because of the initial choice that
all the patrons at the club made.
4) The actual national health impact of passive smoking is actually
quite small. Accepting the possibly biased facts from cancer.org we
have 3,000 additional death per year from passive smoking. That ends
up being a yearly risk to nonsmokers of .001% Its very likely that
reducing the exposure further reduces the risk. This isn't to say that
this is 'unimportant' just that its not as horrific as some seem to
imply as they use loaded langauge.
5) I personally don't care very much if they enact a smoking ban. The
most annoying aspect of it will be listening to people self
righteously blather about how great it is now that there is no smoking
at the Upstage. I hate that. This will make me punch people.
6) Pittsburgh is not San Francisco or New York. The experiences with
no smoking bans there may or may not say something about what one
would be like here. My personal feeling is that even if there was a
ban there would be a whole *hell* of a lot of bars that would still
have smoking in them. You tell some of these tiny hole in the wall
neighborhood bars that no one can smoke in them. I don't think it will
go very far.
7) Lastly, a smoking ban might end up being good for the economy as a
whole or it might be bad. In the specific case of the upstage I think
it will end up being a drag on their bottom line.