 The world continues to end on a Thursday. See this Post Gazette article from September 7th; a more detailed article from Pittsburghlive, and a synopsis from bizjournals.
A really detailed breakdown of the Clean Indoor Air act, signed June, 2008. And The Law Itself, if you're of a mind to parse the legalese.
1. This kills the Beehive smoking section. The Beehive smoking section is roughly 3/4 of the shop by volume, and more like 4/5 of the shop by customers. If they can't find a loophole they're looking at a potentially massive hit to business.
2. Bars that either don't sell food or make less than 20% of their revenue through food are apparently fine. Smokers are still GO! for the Smiling Moose, Dee's (probably - they have a grill but it isn't used all that much, so I dunno), and various other Pittsburgh bars.
3. The common "gimme" is that "you can always smoke outside." I think their thinking on this is that Pittsburgh air is so fucking filthy that nobody will notice.
4. What they will notice, however, is all that secondhand smoke billowing out from crowds of loiterers forced onto the street. While forcing it outside solves the "problem" for the interior of establishments, it only moves the problem - outside, in front of the establishment. This was a major problem when I was in Philadelphia, as every bar had a crowd in front of it, often blocking the entrance, often completely blocking street traffic. Forcing the dope fiends outside creates a pedestrian traffic obstruction and exposes them to secondhand smoke they wouldn't be encountering if the fiends were allowed to stay indoors with their laptops and bookbags and ash trays.
5. A lot of those obstructed pedestrians are non-smokers. Some of them are even the passive-aggressive nanny-state whiners who support the ban. Whiners who will now be more exposed to secondhand. Verily, I am amused.
6. My biggest issue with smoking bans of any sort is a simple one : taxes. The gubmint makes quite a lot of money off of the legal vices - booze and nicotine. Booze arguably causes vastly more damage in terms of lives lost and property destroyed than smoking does, but it continues to proliferate - people like to get out of their heads, and the tax revenue more than makes up for the additional inconvenience. By effectively banning smoking in all of the places that smokers congregate to smoke, you're passively encouraging them to quite - passively-aggressively encouraging them come winter. This doesn't effect the die-hard junkies, as they're already chainsmoking in their recliners at home. But overall, the long term effect is that some people will quit, and fewer people will be socially "encouraged" to pick up the habit. Fewer smokers means fewer people buying cigarettes means less tax revenue.... and with the price of a pack floating around the five dollar mark, you're talking about a lot of tax revenue. If the aggro non-smoking crowd had their way and everybody quit (For Your Health! For The Environment! Big Tobacco Is Evil! Damn The Man! etc.), well... what then?
A quick google digs up this article from 2002 in which a $0.69 tax increase projected $896 million in additional revenue. That's almost a billion dollars - on top of the existing tax revenue - a bunch of lung-killing dope fiends give the state every year. A billion buys a lot of school books. Or more accurately, makes a lot of BMW payments.
7. For me, while this is incentive to re-drop a habit I had, lost, and re-acquired, it amounts to a savings of $150 a month and an additional incurred expense of approximately $30-40 a month for anti-anxiety medication and possibly additional medical expenses in the event that my IBS - dormant in the presence of nicotine - flares up again. And since the anti-anxiety meds have a grotesque multiplier effect in the presence of alcohol (think : you feel really REALLY good after a few drinks, and then really REALLY horrible the next day), I'd wind up drinking a hell of a lot less than I do now. Thus depriving the state of a small but steady and dependable revenue stream. Yes, I'll live longer. I'll be able to think "deep" again. I'll have more energy than I know what to do with again. But I won't enjoy it as much.
Coffee, however, will go from hitting me like a moth to hitting me like a ton of bricks driven into my skull. By a brick truck. Dropped from fucking orbit. So there's that, at least.
7.A. Also - assuming I follow through, do the three days of Total Hell and the two months of depression, etc - all ATC characters who smoke will inevitably start smoking again. This drug really gets under your skin, folks - a few hits as a teen and I'd find myself longingly drawing a character smoking. Whitehouse was created as a chainsmoker a week or so after quitting (for a year and a half) in 2005; West, Ornix, and Thad have all been drawn as smokers around a similar time period and for similar reasons. When I started back up again, these character traits completely disappeared and I had to remind myself - constantly - that these characters do in fact smoke.
7.B. This'll also give me some additional incentive to delve into a subtler plot point, re: The Dualist - that being Thad's nicotine addition is a physical thing that Thad's-Mind-In-Val's-Body isn't subject to.
8. As with everything in my life, I think about needing or wanting to do it and then Something Happens that makes the decision less of a voluntary thing and more of a necessity. If only this skill could be used for direct personal gain instead of around-the-margins course adjustment. :P |
