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I would have a no-smoking inside rule. First, you cannot really insulate the units to prevent smoke from going through. Since a large percentage of renters want a smoke-free apartment these days, they win. Second, smokers are more likely to start a fire and in the long-term it will take more money to clean it up so that it can be rented or sold to non-smokers. I'd have no problems if my tenants chewed tobacco, or engaged in whatever activities they like that don't cost me more in the long run, either in terms of lost business or in terms of additional expenses to fix the mess they produce.
If you OWN your own single family house nobody can tell you NOT to smoke in there, last time I checked. Insurance companies will charge you more for fire insurance, as they should.

I'm not a smoker, but I love some. I have been disgusted by the venomous attacks on smokers in recent years. It's gone beyond anything sane or rational. The way this issue galvanizes the wild eyed frothing-at-the-mouth finger pointers into action is quite striking. At times I've imagined the rounding up and quarantining of smokers into re-education camps. Crazy times.

I believe the numbers are soft on the danger of second hand smoke. I am not an epidemiologist, but have a broad background in both biological and physical sciences (original training in biochemistry, currently work as a design engineer in medical imaging, many publications and patents.) When Helena, Montana banned smoking in bars, Stanton Glantz wrote a paper (with huge fanfare & Op Ed in NYT) noting that hospital admissions for heart attacks in area hospitals fell 60 % in 6 months following institution of the ban -- (or similar numbers, I am quoting from memory.) Well, it turns out the total decrease was somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 to 7 fewer admissions. That number is just too small to draw valid statistical conclusions. The brouhaha was, however, enormous. You may not like your neighbors' smoke, but I question whether your nose can detect in your own apartment. (Go ahead, yell at me for that.)

Full disclosure: I smoked Pall Mall straights for over 20 years, have been off 'em for about 20, still enjoy the occasional pipe or cigar.

Good judgement is the result of experience, and experience is the result of bad judgement.

the prospect of america frightens and threatens many americans, apparently. we baby boomers had a moment to glimpse the greater possibilities of this grand 'experiment' that we are and are living, and all of us afterward have seen us arrive where we are. frogs.

my mom was french. she wanted to be a writer. all i have of her writings is a 50 year old paper on which she cheerily noted 'all americans are peasants'. she smoked 'pelo rojo', a strong south american cigarette. can you imagine a france where this sort of anti-smoking jazz is tolerated? it's there. another increment in the americanization effect. some basic common sense has been overcome. in france of all places.

the booze effect.

this is some kind of licentiousness, it really is, an exploration into the freedom to be stupid, to be what, autocratic? controlling.

i grew up with aspirations of the culture of a rare moment. mike gravel's call for full legalization of marijuana use speaks to that and gives me me respite.

'The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.' - Robert A. Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

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this old quote has been kicking around my computers in one form or another for a dozen years. the preciseness of the wording always catches my attention and gives me pause for thought. maybe it's just an effect, bespeaking effective writing that gets one to consider it.

how do we arrest this senseless controlling thing? we laugh at it. we read. we light up. and arrest our own impulse to arrest.

me, i'm a protestant.

if freedom's spark really has ignited in the bolivian revolution, i'd look at the divides there in it's christian culture. in any case, south america comes to mind as the last stronghold of any sense of tolerance towards substances. really. forget your amsterdam. and then i think of the deeper indiginous people there, in amazonia and elsewhere. imagine telling an indiginous man he cannot smoke a cigarette in his home. it's so absurd.

ribit.

They ARE on prozac.

Someone pointed out lately that when America becomes the dystopia she is working on becoming, it won't be the way Orwell pictured it in 1984 (though in some ways it will) but will be more like what Huxley imagined in Brave New World where everyone was on Soma.

I am one who is for the legalization of all drugs as a first step, then regulating the sale of drugs and stipulating that all users of regulated drugs see a licensed health monitor funded by the state. All addictive drugs would be regulated and there would be no change for prescription drugs. Nothing is as simple as it seems and so there would be some fine tuning. Tobacco would be regulated, as it is highly addictive.

Legalization would take pressure off the users and law enforcement while keeping the pressure on those not licensed to provide the drugs. I have heard that the tobacco companies already have owned, for decades, the rights to grow marijuana. Crack cocaine is terrible, but users would not be prosecuted, only the manufacturers.

When tobacco was first introduced in Britain, some doctors knew that it was bad stuff and apparently wrote about it. They could see what was happening to smokers, just as they could see what was happening to people living in highly polluted areas.

Living in a condo, and with a wife who years ago went to the hospital with pneumonia from my smoking cigars in the house, at which point I complete quit all smoking to our mutual benefit, I am outraged when the smoke from my tobacco addicted neighbor drifts in my windows and patio slider, forcing me to close everything. We live near the beach and have no air conditioning. Therefore, when the noxious odors of the neighbor's tobacco smoke enter my home, which smells as though it had resided in his lungs for about a week getting moldy, he is dictating to me how I live in my home. Windows closed on a pleasant, breezy day means the same as the day suddenly turning to dead air and heating up.

Walking out my front door, if he is home and his front door open, I am attacked by the odor. Barbecuing in the back yard, if he is out back and smoking, we are forced to eat indoors to escape the smoke. The smoker becomes a dictator to my way of life.

My brother is a smoker and I remember when I was a smoker decades in the past. Smokers don't get it. They believe that non-smokers are oversensitive whiners. Their response is "Hey, get a grip. People smoke. I'm a smoker. It's a free country." Yes, it's a free country. My father used to say that freedom in the US was that we can all swing our arms as hard as we want so long as we don't hit the tip of the other guy's nose.

The bottom line is that smokers do not have the right to impose their addiction on others. Tobacco smoke is insidious stuff that permeates and creeps. My neighbor is constantly hitting the tip of my nose with the swinging fist of his habit. I would be content if he would smoke only while sitting in his home, with his doors and windows closed, by one of those little smoke eliminator units. He has a terrible debilitating habit that will probably take at least five years off his lifespan. If he wants to die that badly, let him do it quietly without inflicting his addiction disease on others.

And that is why the regulations against smoking are such a relief for people who live in condo and apartment units, especially in California where doors and windows are open all year long. They are long overdue.

Channing
Ventura CA USA

Its a tough issue, whose rights trump others. But like the seatbelt laws, I believe the smoking laws should all go away. YMMV, but in cases of personal habits that primarily effect only that person and where other remedies are not only found but taken, I have to fall on the side of less intrusion rather than more.

I don't smoke, and I wear my seatbelt. But I hate that the government thinks it has the power to instruct me either way. Education and consequences should be left to Darwinian results.

In Ontario Canada we have a law banning smoking in all public places.
Bars can't have smokers.
They pay their taxes.
They pay their mortgages.
A beer and a smoke go together.
But our law says no.
Bars are closing. There is no freedom.
Just that you should know.
I smoke.
I DON'T go to bars.
Why can't bars allow smoking?
The people who wanted smoking banned in bars, don't go to bars.
Yet the government complains that the taxes from bars are dwindling.

_{repressive governments mix administrative clumsiness & inefficiency with authoritarian tendencies.}

Owners do not and should not have absolute property rights. A landlord cannot refuse to rent to a mixed-race couple, for example. A landlord can evict tenants who frequently play loud recordings at 2:00 am. Should the landlord be able to say that s/he doesn't want recordings with bad language in his buildings? Is that a property right? Should a vegetarian landlord be able to ban the cooking of meat on grills, on the grounds that the smell is disgusting?

I'm seeing a movement towards use of so-called property rights to control behavior in ways that are disturbing. Of course, if you're well off enough to own your home, it's not an issue. So we're talking largely about controlling the behavior of the less well off. For their own good, of course.

I smoke when I drink beer. That means that 3 or 4 nights a week (less during the winter) I smoke between 9 PM and bedtime. Otherwise I never even think of it. I've done this for decades.

I feel guilty about any health damage that I may have done to bartenders over the years. Even if everyone who came to bars was like me and only smoked for a few hours a week, if you worked at a bar you'd be exposed to the limited amount of smoke produced by a lot of people. But most of the bartenders smoked themselves.

To my knowledge there has never been an ordinance anywhere that required barowners to allow smoking in their bars. And nobody has ever been forced to work at a bar. Why weren't there many nonsmoking bars before? All of the people who now say they were so oppressed by us smokers would have gone there, wouldn't they? And people who didn't like to work around smoke would have worked there for less money, presumably. It sounds like it would have been a gold mine.

Nowadays I can no longer talk to bartenders (a serious limitation for someone with my social skills, although probably a relief to bartenders). I can't smoke in my apartment. So I smoke and drink less during the winter - no doubt a good thing.

I have also been a bicycle commuter for 33 or 34 years. I've never worn a helmet. When I started nobody did ... then it became a yuppie thing and all about consumer goods and conspicuous consumption. The same people who are responsible for the smoking ban have been lecturing me for decades about wearing a helmet. They have even tried to get laws passed in some places requiring bicyclists to wear helmets.

I hate being told how to live my life by yuppies. That's probably why I still smoke. I'm certainly not addicted.

Baby boomers like to congratulate themselves for their struggle against the Viet Nam war. It certainly was a senseless slaughter and deserving of opposition but the baby boomers opposition could also be seen as a self-serving refusal to inconvenience ourselves in service to our country. The fact that as a generation we declined to inconvenience ourselves to do anything about our dependence upon foreign oil even though the potential consequences became apparent during the 70s and the military-industrial complex has used this dependence as an excuse to meddle in the Middle East all throughout our adulthood certainly doesn't make our earlier refusal to serve in Viet Nam look very altruistic. Nor does the fact that baby boomers have been notorious for their conspicuous consumption despite our much-publicized rejection of our parents materialism when we were young.

All this makes me wonder about all of this finger-wagging about other people's vices now that we've gotten too old for them. We are the Crown of Creation, after all.

In Canada, a new smoking culture is booming - you see them everywhere, the smokers that is. They huddle together on the street in front of their office building - managers, secretaries, cleaners ..... there is no class distinction. It has become an extension of the gossip mill at the water cooler.

In winter, in 20 degrees below C or more, patients are standing outside beside their I.V. poles, wearing hospital gowns under their coats, chatting and shivering with other smokers.

The smokers used to stand right outside the front door of their buildings. As a result of complaints, a new law requires they smoke further away from the entrance.

They're a sad lot, really. Addiction is tough to break. Disgust with and compassion for smokers are attitudes that are difficult to reconcile.

As of 1 January 2008, a ban on smoking will apply to all public areas in Amsterdam Airport Schiphol's terminal complex. From that date on, smoking will also be prohibited in bars, cafés and restaurants and in airline lounges. A smoking ban was already in force in other parts of the terminal.

Amsterdam Airport Schiphol's decision to implement this measure in January comes ahead of the governments Tobacco Act, which comes into force in July 2008

No substitute smoking facilities for passengers will be placed in the terminal. The terminal area encompasses the passageway to and from the parking areas and the WTC Schiphol.
Source

As a tenant who has experienced living next door to smoker, I am a strong proponent of smoke-free policies in multi-unit buildings. I have met many landlords who made their buildings smoke-free to save $$ on maintenance cost and to avoid fires. They rent to smokers but simply require that smoking take place outdoors, away from the building.

Folks interested in the engineering rationale for smoke-free policies can view recent research in multiunit buildings at the following:

Link

This research was funded by the American Cancer Society in Minnesota. The bottom line is that harmful gases travel between units via spaces created by plumbing, electric outlets and and construction gaps, not to mention open windows. Paths are unpredictable although units above smokers tend to receive more gases. Ventilation remedies are expensive, disruptive, and time consuming. Smoke-free policies save money, are legal, are attractive to tenants and protect the health of tenants and building workers.

Secondhand smoke exposure causes disease and premature death in children and adults who do not smoke. The scientific evidence indicates there is no risk-free level of exposure to secondhand smoke. I have worked in my community to promote voluntary smoke-free policies but will also support ordinances once we have educated the public on the need.

Really why?

I hope the non-smoking majority begins to realize the possible implications for themselves. I think of right-wing zealots as those most likely to exaggerate, distort or lie outright. It disturbs me greatly when I see moderates or liberals do the same. This debate inevitably brings out the best of many & the worst of some. For example, I saw a snippet of interview on Democracy Now! which I believe was a tribute to a deceased environmental activist. She said something about "...babies being born with no genitals because of the pesticides sprayed on tobacco...". As a Master Gardener I was speechless at the "Rush Limbaugh-like" distortion. Tobacco hornworms (the primary pest) are virtually identical to tomato hornworms, both born of hummingbird moth eggs laid on crops that grow all season long & the same pesticide is used for both crops. She may as well have accused all those who eat ketchup, spaghetti sauce or salsa of the same atrocious connection, however the bigotry is saved for smokers. The actual problem is the pesticides (as always) not the crops. I would like to see some sanity and mutual respect return to the debate & so I thank you again for your words.

Stars & Stripes

Fines begin at 25 euros for lighting up around children, pregnant women

By Sandra Jontz, Stars and Stripes
European edition, Tuesday, November 20, 2007

NAPLES, Italy — So there’s burning trash, and cars spewing too much carbon dioxide. But in an attempt to curtail the increased incidents of lung cancer in this southern Italian metropolis, Naples officials have banned smoking — outdoors.

Starting Sunday, the city has enacted an ordinance that bans lighting up in public parks or outdoor rallies and cultural events if children or pregnant woman are present.

“It’s funny that Naples would be the city to ban it. I mean, with all the burning garbage and all, that’s the problem?” asked an incredulous Hospitalman Dennis Lees, 23. “If they’re concerned about air quality, they should be concerned about the burning trash.

“I live in the barracks [at the Capodichino base,] and on any given day I can look out and see several smoke pillars, random fires happening.”

Naples isn’t really known for its stringent enforcement of laws. Drivers run red lights right in front of police; motorists on scooters ride past them wearing no helmets and continue on ticket-free.

Carlo Schettini, commander of the municipal police, was quoted Monday in the Naples’ daily newspaper Il Napoli as saying enforcement of the ordinance would be very “soft,” though more police are expected to patrol parks now that the ban is in effect.

“First you can’t smoke in bars, and now you can’t smoke outside. Outside,” emphasized Petty Officer 1st Class Adam Matthews, 33, who has been smoking for about 17 years.

“More than half of the police are going to be smoking while writing you the ticket,” he laughed.

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