Fast Eddie’s Bon Air Legally Gets Around Illinois’ 2008 Smoking Ban
The last time I visited Fast Eddie’s Bon Air in Alton IL (map), in 1998 or 1099, it was filled with smoke. Yesterday my fiancé and I had lunch there, his first time. Owner Eddie Sholar was a vocal opponent of the Illinois smoking ban that started on January 1, 2008.
In 2006:
Eddie Sholar doesn’t like all this talk about smoking bans. In his Alton bar, Fast Eddie’s Bon Air, about half the customers smoke. But he said they probably won’t quit if the politicians in Springfield enact a statewide ban. They’ll just drink someplace else. “They’re not going to come to a place where they can’t smoke, if other places are allowing it. If you have Missouri, where you can, and Illinois, where you can’t, they’re not going to come some place where they can’t do what they want to do,” Sholar said. The talk in Springfield this week was about a statewide smoking ban, which would replace Illinois’ six-week-old law that lets local governments outlaw smoking on their own. (Daily Chronicle)
Months after the ban started:
At Fast Eddie’s Bon Air in Alton, one of the state’s busiest bars, the owners spent some $800,000 to build an outdoor facility resembling an old-time ballpark. The serving bar sits beneath an overhang. In winter, massive heaters blow warm air on the patrons, many of them smokers.
“I would never credit this stupid smoking law, but it certainly has helped our business,” said Ed Sholar Jr., whose family owns the bar. (Chicago Tribune)
Nearly a million dollars for a patio? Once you see what was built you’ll understand why it cost so much. The street was moved to make room for the outdoor soon. Basically they built a massive addition to the building, the translucent roof is raised enough to make it outdoors — technically. Fans and heaters keep the temperature more hospitable than the parking lot. This design also make it easy to ensure all guests pass through the front door, have proper ID, and are 21 years old. After six years of twice the seating capacity I wonder how they feel about the smoking ban, business is still great but they likely took on debt to fund the outdoor space.
We sat indoors, but walked through the outdoor room when we left. It was noticeably smokey, despite the efforts to minimize it. I wouldn’t sit there, but thankfully the inside is smoke-free. UrbanSpoon has 30 reviews and none mention smoking. Yelp has 125 reviews, 19 mention smoke/smoking, the relevant parts from each:
- now that the inside is non-smoking, it’s more crowded outside…and that’s where the real action is
- We sat outside (under an awning) but couldn’t smell any smoke b/c of the efficient set-up of fans circulating the air.
- It’s smoke free inside, but there’s now a HUGE smoking area outside, complete with giant heaters for the winter months, and another bar.
- This place has a lot of history and a lot of character, and it’s much nicer now that smoking in indoor restaurants has been banned in Illinois.
- Not a fan at all. The outside is still smoking and with the canopy the smoke [sic] is unbearable. Went here for a friend’s birthday party to listen to his favorite band and I had to leave after an hour the smoke was so bad.
- I have only been once in the evening to enjoy the music and it was a great time, but since IL is smoke free now, I am a pretty big fan of Sunday lunches at Fast Eddies.
- Yeah it doesn’t look like much inside, but I enjoy all the different areas you can sit inside and the new patio is nice. Well, actually I dont know it anyother way. Sucks that thats where people have to smoke, but if I can eat unhealthy amounts of food and wreck my body in that way, then let people screw their lungs up all they want. Right?
- Love this place. Great live bands, cheap cheap CHEAP food and drink. Only bad is all the smoke and sometimes a tad rough crowd. Will always be a fan. Bring cash bc no credit cards are accepted.
- The patio was crowded. A large cloud of smoke lingered around the ceiling and it looked like everything was clouded by a haze. We stayed inside but somehow I still smelled like smoke when I left.
- I’d say my favorite part is that the inside is smoke free. I love that there’s still a nice outside area, but being able to breathe indoors is always a plus.
- Awesome place, bring friends. Can get noisy, so if you don’t like crowds or noise, stay away. No smoking indoors, which is good, but smoking allowed on back covered patio. 2 bars outside, 2 inside.
- They have a nice outdoor area, which in the winter is enclosed with a tent but not really heated much… and they seem to be defying IL law by allowing people to smoke in the outdoor area (yes, it’s illegal to allow it outdoors even).
- As for the crowd at Eddies, let’s just say it’s ermmm … interesting and eclectic. LOTS of bikers, lots of smokers, and lots of loud types. To call it a rough crowd seems suitable, to me. It’s just not the kind of place most who aren’t into A) smoking, B) drinking of cheap liquor (house drinks are made with the cheapest stuff you can find … Juarez tequila for margaritas (GAG), C) hanging with bikers, or D) eating lower quality food to save yourself a buck.
- It’s almost always a good time at Fast Eddie’s. They have the nice outdoor area for people to be able to smoke and watch TV without freezing, live bands all the time, and great prices on good bar food.
- Good concept, like the casual atmosphere. Their covered patio is a neat idea. The cover band was very good, the food is ok and cheap. Drinks weren’t too expensive and service was prompt and fun to interact with. Coming from an area with no inside smoking though, this place was horrible for that.
- Cheapest bar food ever. The fact that it’s now smoke free makes me want to go to this place more and more often, but it’s hard to really justify going all the way out there just for 1$ brats and burgers and their amazing steak on a stick… no wait… it isn’t.
- Been to Fast Eddies many times and never been disappointed. Good food, cold beer, low prices. Non smoking inside is great.
- Its one step up from a dive bar. Its smoke free inside which makes it better.
- I go there because my friends enjoy the place. the outdoor area is covered with a plastic sheet which makes you feel like ur trapped in a glad bag in the hot sun with smokers all around you! not a good feeling or smell for your clothes! the floor outdoors is filthy, people just throw there peel n eat shells from the shrimp on the hot asphalt, like they were peanut shells. talk bout a great smell along with cig smoke! the only thing worth going for is the VERY COLD high priced beer.
Mixed reviews of the outdoor area, but all are happy the indoor space is smoke-free.
The outdoor area is a smokey area, likely damaging to the servers who work there. However, the smoke-free interior allows those servers who’re concerned about second-hand smoke to continue working without having to take health risks. Customers can experience Fast Eddie’s without having to pass through the smokey outdoor area.
Compromises are just that.
— Steve Patterson
Hitler’s Anti-Tobacco Campaign
One particularly vile individual, Karl Astel — upstanding president of Jena University, poisonous anti-Semite, euthanasia fanatic, SS officer, war criminal and tobacco-free Germany enthusiast — liked to walk up to smokers and tear cigarettes from their unsuspecting mouths. (He committed suicide when the war ended, more through disappointment than fear of hanging.) It comes as little surprise to discover that the phrase “passive smoking” (Passivrauchen) was coined not by contemporary American admen, but by Fritz Lickint, the author of the magisterial 1100-page Tabak und Organismus (“Tobacco and the Organism”), which was produced in collaboration with the German AntiTobacco League.
This pretty well destroys the Myth of second hand smoke:
http://vitals.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/28/16741714-lungs-from-pack-a-day-smokers-safe-for-transplant-study-finds?lite
Lungs from pack-a-day smokers safe for transplant, study finds.
By JoNel Aleccia, Staff Writer, NBC News.
Using lung transplants from heavy smokers may sound like a cruel joke, but a new study finds that organs taken from people who puffed a pack a day for more than 20 years are likely safe.
What’s more, the analysis of lung transplant data from the U.S. between 2005 and 2011 confirms what transplant experts say they already know: For some patients on a crowded organ waiting list, lungs from smokers are better than none.
“I think people are grateful just to have a shot at getting lungs,” said Dr. Sharven Taghavi, a cardiovascular surgical resident at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia, who led the new study………………………
Ive done the math here and this is how it works out with second ahnd smoke and people inhaling it!
The 16 cities study conducted by the U.S. DEPT OF ENERGY and later by Oakridge National laboratories discovered:
Cigarette smoke, bartenders annual exposure to smoke rises, at most, to the equivalent of 6 cigarettes/year.
146,000 CIGARETTES SMOKED IN 20 YEARS AT 1 PACK A DAY.
A bartender would have to work in second hand smoke for 2433 years to get an equivalent dose.
Then the average non-smoker in a ventilated restaurant for an hour would have to go back and forth each day for 119,000 years to get an equivalent 20 years of smoking a pack a day! Pretty well impossible ehh!
Female servers have been known to get pregnant, keep working as long as they can during their pregnancy.
“When expectant mothers are exposed to smoke from other people’s cigarettes, their babies are also exposed. One study showed that a pregnant woman’s exposure to smoke for at least two hours a day doubled her risk of delivering a low birthweight baby. While older studies claimed no increased SIDS risk if the father smoked, a newer study reports a higher risk of SIDS if the father smokes. Demand that your husband and co-workers respect the life inside your womb. If your job requires working in a smoke-contaminated environment while pregnant, know that this is a proven health hazard to your baby and is grounds for reassignment to a baby-healthy environment. As a testimony to the wisdom of the body, many mothers find they have an aversion to being around cigarette and cigar smoke (and to drinking alcohol) while pregnant. Listen to the warnings of your body and hundreds of medical studies: Don’t expose yourself and your baby to smoke while pregnant. Legally, you have the right to work in a smoke-free environment.”
http://www.askdrsears.com/topics/parenting/child-rearing-and-development/bringing-baby-home/how-smoking-harms-babies/how-0
Study: Babies’ low serotonin levels cause SIDS – USATODAY.comwww.usatoday.com/news/health/2010-02-03-sids03_st_N.htmCached – Similar
You +1’d this publicly. Undo
Feb 2, 2010 – Sudden infant death syndrome researchers say low serotonin may be what prevents infants from waking up when they inhale too much carbon …
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2010-02-03-sids03_st_N.htm
Researchers may have solved the mystery of what makes some babies vulnerable to sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, which kills more than 2,300 babies a year.
Infants who died of SIDS had low levels of serotonin, a brain chemical that helps the brainstem regulate breathing, temperature, sleeping, waking and other automatic functions, according to an autopsy study in today’s Journal of the American Medical Association.
Serotonin normally helps babies respond to high carbon-dioxide levels during sleep by helping them wake up and shift their head position to get fresh air, says senior author Hannah Kinney of Harvard Medical School and Children’s Hospital Boston.
“The hospital are letting pregnant women smoke on there premisis? How shameful. Pregnant women who smoke during pregnancy should be charged with child abuse. I really hate seeing it.”
In more rational times, before the anti-tobacco hysteria began in earnest, women who smoked continued to smoke and enjoy other normal pleasures of life without guilt during their pregnancies. Many even smoked during labour to help them relax and take the edge off their pain. If their doctors mentioned smoking at all, it would be to advise them to perhaps cut down if they were heavy smokers, something which most did intuitively because they didn’t “feel” like smoking as much.
But pity the poor smoker today who becomes pregnant, because she will be told that if she continues to smoke at all (or have any alcohol or caffeine) during her pregnancy, she is putting her developing fetus at high risk of death or disability.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Though there is considerable evidence showing that on average the babies of women who smoke during pregnancy weigh on average a few ounces less than babies of women who do not smoke and that the rate of low birthweight babies is somewhat higher for smokers, there is no credible evidence for the hyperbolic claims that the babies of smokers have a higher mobidity and mortality rate. Quite the contrary, the babies of women who smoke during pregnancy have a better survival rate ounce for ounce, a somewhat lower rate of congenital defects, a lower rate of Down’s syndrome, a lower rate of infant respiratory distress syndrome and a somewhat lower rate of childhood cancer than do the babies of non-smokers.
Dr. Richard L. Naeye, a leading obstetrical researcher who studied more than 58,000 pregnancies, states unequivocally:
“We recently found no significant association between maternal smoking and either stillbirths or neonatal deaths when information about the underlying disorders, obtained from placental examinations, was incorporated into the analyses. Similar analyses found no correlation between maternal smoking and preterm birth. The most frequent initiating causes of preterm birth, stillbirth, and neonatal death are acute chorioamnionitis, disorders that produce chronic low blood flow from the uterus to the placenta, and major congenital malformations. There is no credible evidence that cigarette smoking has a role in the genesis of any of these disorders.””
You’re right, it’s completely safe.
Judge doesnt accept statistical studies as proof of LC causation!
It was McTear V Imperial Tobacco. Here is the URL for both my summary and the Judge’s ‘opinion’ (aka ‘decision’):
http://boltonsmokersclub.wordpress.com/the-mctear-case-the-analysis/
(2.14) Prof Sir Richard Doll, Mr Gareth Davies (CEO of ITL). Prof James Friend and
Prof Gerad Hastings gave oral evidence at a meeting of the Health Committee in
2000. This event was brought up during the present action as putative evidence that
ITL had admitted that smoking caused various diseases. Although this section is quite
long and detailed, I think that we can miss it out. Essentially, for various reasons, Doll
said that ITL admitted it, but Davies said that ITL had only agreed that smoking might
cause diseases, but ITL did not know. ITL did not contest the public health messages.
(2.62) ITL then had the chance to tell the Judge about what it did when the suspicion
arose of a connection between lung cancer and smoking. Researchers had attempted
to cause lung cancer in animals from tobacco smoke, without success. It was right,
therefore, for ITL to ‘withhold judgement’ as to whether or not tobacco smoke caused
lung cancer.
[9.10] In any event, the pursuer has failed to prove individual causation.
Epidemiology cannot be used to establish causation in any individual case, and the
use of statistics applicable to the general population to determine the likelihood of
causation in an individual is fallacious. Given that there are possible causes of lung
cancer other than cigarette smoking, and given that lung cancer can occur in a nonsmoker,
it is not possible to determine in any individual case whether but for an
individual’s cigarette smoking he probably would not have contracted lung cancer
(paras.[6.172] to [6.185]).
[9.11] In any event there was no lack of reasonable care on the part of ITL at any
point at which Mr McTear consumed their products, and the pursuer’s negligence
case fails. There is no breach of a duty of care on the part of a manufacturer, if a
consumer of the manufacturer’s product is harmed by the product, but the consumer
knew of the product’s potential for causing harm prior to consumption of it. The
individual is well enough served if he is given such information as a normally
intelligent person would include in his assessment of how he wishes to conduct his
life, thus putting him in the position of making an informed choice (paras.[7.167] to
[7.181]).
If you’re afraid of second-hand smoke, you should also avoid cars, restaurants…and don’t even think of barbecuing.
here are just some of the chemicals present in tobacco smoke and what else contains them:
Arsenic, Benzine, Formaldehyde.
Arsenic- 8 glasses of water = 200 cigarettes worth of arsenic
Benzine- Grilling of one burger = 250 cigarettes
Formaldehyde – cooking a vegetarian meal = 100 cigarettes
When you drink your 8 glasses of tap water (64 ounces) a day, you’re safely drinking up to 18,000 ng of arsenic by government safety standards of 10 nanograms/gram (10 ng/gm = 18,000ng/64oz) for daily consumption.
Am I “poisoning” you with the arsenic from my cigarette smoke? Actually, with the average cigarette putting out 32 ng of arsenic into the air which is then diluted by normal room ventilation for an individual exposure of .032 ng/hour, you would have to hang out in a smoky bar for literally 660,000 hours every day (yeah, a bit hard, right?) to get the same dose of arsenic that the government tells you is safe to drink.
So you can see why claims that smokers are “poisoning” people are simply silly.
You can stay at home all day long if you don’t want all those “deadly” chemicals around you, but in fact, those alleged 4000-7000 theorized chemicals in cigarettes are present in many foods, paints etc. in much larger quantities. And as they are present in cigarettes in very small doses, they are harmless. Sorry, no matter how much you like the notion of harmful ETS, it’s a myth.
Leave smokers alone
The real tragedy here is smokers that have been beaten down for the sole reason of being smokers, thanks to a top-down campaign to cast them aside for the crime of enjoying something some people object to
by Richard White on 8 January 2014 06:54
When George Godber spoke at the 3rd World Conference on Smoking and Health in 1975, he gave his vision of the future: “our target must be, in the long-term, the elimination of cigarette smoking…”, he said.
“We may not have eliminated cigarette smoking completely by the end of this century, but we ought to have reached a position where a relatively few addicts still use cigarettes, but only in private at most in the company of consenting adults… The practice ought to be an enclosed one, not to be endured by the non-smoker in ordinary social intercourse; and no one should be allowed to use advertisement or any indirect means to suggest otherwise.”
In 1975, the general public would have scoffed at such a notion, but it was the apparent threat of secondhand smoke to non-smokers that gave anti-smokers the golden key to legislation restricting smoking from any indoor area.
It didn’t matter that the 1992 EPA report first demonstrating harm only managed to do so by cherry-picking studies and lowering the confidence interval – and even then, finding that for every 40,000 worker-years of exposure to omnipresent smoke as in the 1960s, there would be approximately one extra instance of lung cancer – nor that only 15 percent of the studies done on secondhand smoke and lung cancer managed to find any scientifically significant result at all – and even then the results were less “deadly” than wearing a bra.
With the 2007 blanket smoking ban in the UK, anti-smokers have become ever bolder – pushing for smoking bans in cars, hospital grounds, care homes, even talking about private homes.
All of this is based on the harm posed from passive smoking, despite the statistically insignificant relative risk only existing for those living or working with smokers for hours on end, day after day, for decades.
The mantra that secondhand smoke kills thousands a year has continued even though the large prospective studies show otherwise – Enstrom and Kabat found no risk, the WHO found no risk, and now, a new study examined in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute has found no risk, despite the researchers expecting to find one.
Within the study article, though, comes the admission of its roots in Godber’s 1975 comments – Jyoti Patel, MD, explained that there is only a borderline risk of lung cancer from secondhand smoke, but that “[t]he strongest reason to avoid passive cigarette smoke is to change societal behavior: to not live in a society where smoking is a norm”.
And therein lies a chilling message: puritans, with the full backing of the medical establishment, will fabricate health risks to make sure we aren’t doing what they don’t think we should be doing – regardless of the consequences for families and businesses.
It was a given that smoking bans would not pass on that basis, though – health needed to be put at risk to get people to listen. The fabrication is based on distorting science and using weak study models that produce biased results.
Case-control studies depend on people’s recall of smoking exposure 30 or 40 years in the past and are so unreliable they were rejected in the original 1964 Surgeon General’s Report. To lift an excerpt from my own book: “remembering how many cigarettes someone smoked thirty years ago is not an easy task and there is no way the response can be accurate.
In fact, in the 1964 Surgeon General’s Report the authors rejected the retrospective studies and focused on the remaining studies; it speaks volumes that forty years on the medical establishment now accepts flawed methodologies that were rejected in the past for being unreliable.”
Knowing that the real purpose of showing harm from secondhand smoke was to push forward an agenda to marginalise smoking, it stands to reason that retrospective studies were so fervently conducted – while prospective studies take many years to do, retrospective studies can be conducted quickly, frequently and show anything the researchers want them to.
In no time at all, then, a large body of so-called evidence can be amassed, before the first prospective study comes in – so by the time the first, second and third turn up to show the risk of harm has been blown up out of all proportion, anti-smokers are popping the corks in their (presumably non-alcoholic) champagne in celebration of the bans they’ve succeeded in passing.
Yet amidst all this, no one bothered to ask what secondhand smoke actually is. Sure, the smoke on one end is the same as the smoke on the other, but dilution was never considered.
We know that ‘the poison makes the dose’ and that’s why there are safe limits to anything (including water, as anyone who has observed the amusing Dihydrogen Monoxide satire can attest, as even something as necessary as water can be painted to be a societal burden and mass killer), but few cared about the effects of dilution on smoke.
It’s a crucial point though, not least because a non-smoker with long-term exposure to a smoker’s passive smoke will consume only in the region of five cigarettes per year.
Michael McFadden devoted his attention to the properties of secondhand smoke in his book Dissecting Antismokers’ Brains: “about 90 percent of secondary smoke is composed of water and ordinary air with a slight excess of carbon dioxide.
Another 4 perecent is carbon monoxide, a gas that can act as a poison when in sufficient quantity by reducing the amount of oxygen your red blood cells can carry. The last 6 percent contains the rest of the 4,000 or so chemicals supposedly to be found in smoke… but found, obviously, in very small quantities.
“Most of these chemicals can only be found in quantities measured in nanograms, picograms and femtograms. Many cannot even be detected in these amounts: their presence is simply theorized rather than measured. To bring those quantities into a real world perspective, take a saltshaker and shake out a few grains of salt. A single grain of that salt will weigh in the ballpark of 100 million picograms!”
Had the public (or politicians, perhaps) known such information it is doubtful that smoking bans would have passed on the basis of risk to health – after all, if a spouse living with a smoker is consuming five cigarettes in an entire year, how many are (or in the British case, were) being consumed by a person sitting in a bar for a few hours?
It’s the families that have suffered huge rifts through fear, the businesses that have shut down, the elderly and terminally ill pushed outside in the depth of winter.
All of which happened while we were watching X-Factor and celebrating what a civilised country we live in.
Maybe – just maybe – this study, combined with those before it, and the justified attention on the issue, can mark the start of the tide turning to an inclusive society, where we don’t bully and ostracise people for not behaving exactly how we want them to.
The real tragedy here is smokers that have been beaten down for the sole reason of being smokers, thanks to a top-down campaign to cast them aside for the crime of enjoying something some people object to.
Richard White is the author of Smoke Screens: The Truth About Tobacco and owner of Word Edit: Professional Literary Services
Read more on: anti-smoking lobby, Action on Smoking and Health, and denormalisation of smokers and smoking
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4578/leave_smokers_alone
Steve there never were any reasons for a smoking ban at all,not a single one! It was never about health but about control and prohibition yet again.
Even OSHA wouldn’t pass a rule against indoor smoking even with ventilation it just didn’t matter as no level of harm could ever be reached!
Like the smoking bans of the past they were always REPEALED!
Todays will be too!
Heres a time line starting in 1900,dont be surprised to see the same thing playing out today nearly 100 years later.
1901: REGULATION: Strong anti-cigarette activity in 43 of the 45 states. “Only Wyoming and Louisiana had paid no attention to the cigarette controversy, while the other forty-three states either already had anti-cigarette laws on the books or were considering new or tougher anti-cigarette laws, or were the scenes of heavy anti- cigarette activity” (Dillow, 1981:10).
1904: New York: A judge sends a woman to jail for 30 days for smoking in front of her children.
1904: New York City. A woman is arrested for smoking a cigarette in an automobile. “You can’t do that on Fifth Avenue,” the arresting officer says.
1907: Business owners are refusing to hire smokers. On August 8, the New York Times writes: “Business … is doing what all the anti-cigarette specialists could not do.”
1917: SMOKEFREE: Tobacco control laws have fallen, including smoking bans in numerous cities, and the states of Arkansas, Iowa, Idaho and Tennessee.
1937: hitler institutes laws against smoking.This one you can google.
I’ve banned “harleyrider1989” as this person is commenting from Bowling Green KY and has a “low rep” on Disqus. Others can now comment without being bombarded.
I doubt that the servers, here or anywhere else, have much choice in which sections they’re assigned to – working in an environment where smoking is allowed is pretty much a part of the job description in certain industries, much like being around blood (and blood-borne pathogens) and sick people is part of the job description in many medical professions. If you don’t want to work around smokers, you really only have two choices – suck it up (literally) / tough it out OR choose another industry or employer that provides the environment you’d like to work in. Unfortunately, the hospitality industry combines better pay with poorer working conditions than many other relatively-low-skill jobs (retail, clerical, etc.), and the need / desire to make more / enough money forces many people, especially younger people to make some tough choices. That said, I’m glad that they’ve been able to successfully create a smoke-free zone here, but until smoking is made illegal, it’s unreasonable to expect smokers not (to want) to be able to smoke in public. As for the patio meeting the “legal definition” of being outside, I’m pretty sure that it does, and while separate will never be truly equal, this does seem to be a pretty good compromise for one of the biggest businesses in Alton. Bottom line, it was “good enough” for you and your fiancé to stay and spend your money – if it wasn’t, you would have had every right to spend it somewhere else!
Since the interior is smoke- free indoors it was good enough. I like eating outdoors but their design isn’t like a nice fresh air patio.
If a server working the outside area got pregnant I doubt they’d refuse to assign her to an indoor section if she asked.
I am all for smokers, lets just keep raising the tax on a pack of cigarettes to about $10 a pack. Smokers can choose to continue to smoke and pay the tax or quit if they have the will power, but I wouldn’t waste any more time listening to their excuses or in caring about the result of their personal choices.
Hello Steve, Thanks for posting this.
I notice that harleyrider1989 has been monopolizing the discussion, as he has in the past on the mogasp blog I maintain at mogasp.wordpress.com, as president of Missouri GASP. There the limit per post is 1,000 characters and real names must be used, no pseudonyms. However, he hasn’t invaded that space for some time.
There is sometimes an element of truth in what those opposed to smoke-free air post but it’s overwhelmed by the scientific evidence of how harmful SHS is, both in enclosed indoor spaces and even public outdoor spaces. You cannot adequately provide a smoke-free indoor space if it’s connected to a smoking area, unless the two are physically well-separated. Likewise, allowing smoking near entrances results in some SHS entering the building. (Please Google a paper I coauthored titled “Airport smoking rooms don’t work” for scientific support for this.)
I feel sorry for any employee working in a restaurant, for example, where smoking is allowed, especially if they are at all smoke-sensitive.
i have been there once and literally walked out. the smoke was absolutely disgusting. it felt like i was in one giant ashtray. for all these pro smokers, like harlyrider, i would like to see them in an airtight room with no veneration so they can inhale over and over the poisonous air so they can not only smoke their cig but everyone else’s. then maybe when you need a cancer kazoo later in life, maybe fast eddie with pitch in for your medical bills. what they are putting in cigs now is a lot more toxic than years ago. when you can smell that digesting smell from a smokers car passing by, even with the windows shut, you know that is chemically enhanced and not really tobacco. out and out, sarge