I don't think I have a single reader who is in the dark about my feelings regarding Philadelphia's smoking ban (I think one reader put it best, observing that, "If it were a woman, [I'd] marry her."). But now that over 99% of the places I'd ever want to go are in compliance with the ban, what do I do when I encounter a place that is non-compliant? (Bear in mind, when I say "non-compliant" I don't mean just "allows smoking" but "allows illegal smoking").
This dilemma hit me the other day. I was out with some friends at a dive bar, my first time there, and halfway through the meal, a nearby person lit up. The person next to him saw this, and lit a cigarette as well. Then the bartender came over. I was relieved, expecting him to enforce the "no smoking" sign hanging in the window (a requirement under the ban). Instead he bummed a smoke. I had finished eating, but hadn't paid yet. Part of me wanted to walk out, get stopped, explain I'm allergic to cigarette smoke and I'd be happy to sit back down and pay in accordance with the law as soon as they showed any sign that they cared what the law said. While witty, effective, and snotty, I decided that (a) two wrongs don't make a right and (b) it's not worth the risk to me--if they didn't realize I was making a point and had no intention of not paying under any circumstances, I could face criminal charges while they'd just get a small fine.
So I got the check, paid, and left. My coat now smells of smoke, and I wish I had some legal recourse to send them the dry-cleaning bill, but getting and enforcing such a court order would cost way more than the cleaning service. I brooded back at home, a little ticked off.
I liked this place. The food was decent, extremely cheap, before the cigarette incident, I was planning on coming back. Now my dilemma is: do I report the bar for the violation? Part me says to be the bigger man and simply never come back. Part of me wants to fire an anonymous warning shot, and maybe try coming back there. Part of me wants to stick it to them for causing me such discomfort and inconvenience. And part of me thinks the law is the law.
I was very close to just forgetting about it, and writing a bad review for the bar. But then I realized something else: Philadelphia has a billion+ dollar 5-year fiscal deficit. That bar owes the City some money. Not enough to make a dent, but just on principle. Furthermore, the bar is a poor representative of Philadelphia to any tourists, and discourages people from trying new places and going out. Beyond the fine, that's a lot of economic activity the city loses out on if such flagrant disregard continues. It's one thing to be gracious and nice to people, even if they're breaking the law. I'm not a law enforcement officer; they weren't hurting anyone (oh, wait, actually they were, but anyway...); and in the spirit of individual liberties, I was just going to let it slide. But I can't let it slide if doing so means siding with those people against my own city.
So after my own internal struggle, not only am I going to report the violation, but I'd like to encourage readers to do the same should the situation arise. Cities thrive when the citizenry actively protects it, and urban America needs the help these days. If the smoking ban is good for the city (and all the evidence suggests that smoking bans are great for cities), let's make it a real one, not just a piece of paper to whoever chooses to disregard it. Let's give visitors a good impression, and our fellow residents a cleaner, safer set of choices for going out, spending money, and having a good time. I'm siding with my city.
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7 comments:
You'll be so elated to put another place out of busniness. Instead of snitching, if you just don't go there again, everybody will be better off. He needs his smoking customers to stay open.
After seeing the movie "Valkyrie" it's easy to see why Germany repealed their ban, a law that depends on friends and neighbors snitching on each other.
I don't know what you mean by putting "another" place out of business, unless you're counting that lemonade stand my friends and I beat out when we were 8. And if you're referring to the smoking ban itself, business almost invariably increases when they're enacted. Not only that, but 90% of the time you see an increase in the growth rate of business--that is, not only do you not lose business, but you get more faster.
It's a good law, one worthy of enforcement. A few lone dissenters doesn't constitute a major market failure, but it's not a positive economic phenomenon either. And to suggest that a negligible fine, a warning, and future enforcement will run the place out of business is downright preposterous.
The owner doesn't need his smoking customers; it was one guy who broke the rule, and a few others who followed suit. And the guys who lit up after they saw it was OK weren't customers BECAUSE they saw it was OK. They were already in the bar spending money. He didn't GAIN those customers. He did lose four, though, because my friends and I walked out. So even if the first guy only came because he knew he could smoke, he was still down 3 paying customers as a result. But the owner wasn't there and will never know (not a perfectly competitive market, which requires perfect information among participants).
I'm not going to respond to write an in-depth rebuttal to the second half of your post, as it's an awful analogy and in very poor taste. You can't compare a law that contributes to the public welfare, protects workers, encourages economic growth, is widely supported, and corrects an actual market failure (meaning it brings about the same result that we'd have if the market were efficient and competitive) with the Nazis.
I find the title of blog interesting. You make some very general assumptions and state them as fact.
You state that business always goes up with a smoking ban. In fact the fed as shown a there is a net decrease of 4% percent overall with bars at a 11% reduction. Now maybe you have read the propaganda from the ACS. They have scores of economic studies that show increases. I've read many of their studies all of which contain major flaws. They are designed not to find facts, but to push their point of view. They exclude alcholic drinks or they exlude winter months. They do whatever it takes to make their arguement work. Smart people know to look beyond the advertised numbers.
You also say that if the market efficient and competitive we would need this law. I live in St Louis and we have no ban. The market here has adjusted and works well. A majority of restaurants only allow smoking in the bar area. Many more are completely non-smoking. There are many bars that are non-smoking. In any city, in any state there is a market for smoking and non-smoking venues. When you make one of those markets illegal - the overall market it reduced as the fed has found. It may be only 4%, but that may be the profit for most of these businesses.
You also say these laws are widely supported. I've read a 2005 gallop poll and several recent local polls that trend the same. 70% of people favor allowing smoking in bars. 60% of people favor not allowing smoking in restaurants. While more than half the people would ban smoking in a restaurant, well more than half would allow it in a bar. That I would not call widely supported.
As to the health concerns. Have you read the results from the WHO study, UCLA study and even the EPA study. These all found no correlation to illness from SHS. The Congressional Research Department did its own study and concluded the same. That is why we have no federal ban.
I thought you might have a point and was going to look into it until you claimed that second hand smoke poses no health concerns. Then I realized you're the kind of ideologue you accuse your opposition of being--preferring only studies that support your point in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
First off, non-smoking sections don't work at all. The most comprehensive and well-done study that I've ever seen (as well as the one most cited by many experts in the field) was done by ASHRAE, the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air conditioning Engineers. They found that separate sections, even custom ventilation systems, do little--if anything at all--to decrease the transfer of harmful airborne particulates from smoking sections to non-smoking sections. And the fact that they found harmful airborne particulates seems to support the "second hand smoke is bad for you" argument.
But in case that isn't enough, what do you say to the dozens of reputable studies that do show a link between secondhand smoke and heart disease and lung cancer? Also, I AM familiar with the studies you cited, and the ACS study, while flawed, is the best of all the ones you mentioned. The UCLA study is particularly awful, as they collected data from 1959 to 1988 but only used the 59-72 data, as it best supported their argument. Also, they used a very old population (average age of over 50 if I remember), which skews results for several reasons. Furthermore, the way they screened how much secondhand smoke people were exposed to was dramatically flawed, and they had plenty of people in the "less secondhand smoke" group who were actually exposed to MORE than average amounts. Finally, they threw out 90%--NINETY PERCENT--of study participants. Conclusions were based on their hand-picked TEN PERCENT. Oh, yeah, and like over 75% of studies which reach similar conclusions, it was directly funded by the tobacco industry.
As for the other stuff, the Philadelphia smoking ban has a 70% approval rating at least (the poll that got that number was actually skewed in a way that may have overrepresented people who don't approve of the ban). And the free market doesn't take care of the situation once a smoking-pervasive environment has developed due to imperfect information. To put a large economic effect very simply: A bar owner will lose the smoking customer when he bans smoking, but he has no way of getting the word out to the 3 people who will come once it's banned, since he doesn't know who they are yet. In urban areas, at least, it's good for business.
As for the economic data, as far as the studies I've read say, in aggregate there's no statistically significant effect of smoking bans in general, but if you divide the population up between strong and weak smoking bans, the strong ones have a better economic impact. I can see why a weak ban would confuse people and cause greater losses in customers than gains, but strong ones in urban areas tend to do well. And that's before you account for total economic impact--estimates done in 2005 by the Society of Actuaries indicate there may be as much as $5 billion of economic benefit on the table, that doesn't normally get counted in savings, from direct medical expenses alone.
PiFry -
Great writing. Ignore the idiots. Having smoke in a bar area of a restaurant is like putting a drop of dye in one corner of a beaker solution. Moron.
I would have given the warning shot to the establishment before turning them in, but perhaps thats just because I'm a bit more forgiving to small business who have regular customers that are used to having it "their way." Its always better, I think, for direct communication that allows for the owner to enforce explicitly the laws, rather than indirect communication that results in fines - and makes business owners begrudgingly enforce the laws.
P.S. Pulling a fake out would have probably made you feel better in the short term, and unless you are slow, is also a good cardio exercise that would have helped counter-act some of the tar in your blood stream. I smoke once in a while, but I am very neurotic about not doing it around other people who do not agree to it.
We don't force drugs on others, why should nicotine and tar any different? Oh yeah: its socially acceptable.
This I'll admit to: my reason for not firing a warning shot, as you put it, was purely selfish. I really do like the place, and if they start enforcing the ban, I'll return to it (they have good cheap food). I was worried that being so adversarial would make me persona non grata at the establishment. Since the bartender was smoking, I assigned a high probability to the staff being begrudging anyway, and I didn't want to fix the problem only to not be able to benefit from it in any way.
Actually PiFri - yes I don't believe in smoking bans. Over the past year I've read a lot of research and have still haven't found the "mountain of research" against smoking.
The UCLA study which you throw out was one of the largest, longest running reports. Your statements closely mirror statements from the ACS which has a financial stake is undermining the report. Which is strange since they paid for 90% of the study (didn't care for the preliminary results). In the end, the paper was reviewed and published in the BMJ.
As for the studies that show SHS is harmful. They come in a couple of different varities. First would be the "toxins in workers have dropped 50%" studies. They sample blood from workers pre and post ban and determine that toxis have dropped. That sounds great - but it ignores relavence. A drop from two parts per million to one part per million may be a 50% drop, but it would be to no affect.
The second study is the heart attack studies. One being tauted now is the Pueblo, CO study. Of the hundreds of towns, cities and states they find one that has a post ban drop in heart attacks. Sounds good, but these towns have very small populations. Any researcher could just as easily find a small town that heart attacks go when up when a ban went into effect. Colorado has had a smoking ban for a couple of years now. Why wouldn't they use the entire state since any analysis would benefit from larger numbers.
Finally on the health front - what never made sense to me was that health of the oldest generation. They are living longer and healthier than any generation before. Yet they smoked thier brains out. Those that didn't smoke would have lived with SHS at home, work and play. SHS would be ten times what it is today. Yet if you beleive what such groups as the ACS tell us - they should all be dead. We wouldn't have a social security problem.
As far the economic issues - I'll go with what the fed is telling us has actually happened in communities that have banned smoking. Actuaries think there may be billions of non-smoker dollars out there. But to date, areas with bans haven't seen that come true.
As to ASHRAE - this is not a study they did. This was a statement put out by the President of the associationa that engineers opposed. While you can't remove every particle of SHS - a particle here and there won't hurt anyone. A good example is that it would take you weeks in a smoky bar to get the same level of arsenic that is permissible in drinking water.
I'll leave you with this - your a smart person. Look into how bans are funded. You understand or should that no political movement gains ground without funds. The antismoking movement is well funded. Look who prospers when bans are introduced (not local businessman).
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