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Just as those other regulations are passed because the majority of the community feels they are valuable and contribute to the quality of life in their town or state, so are smoking bans.
So we're back to the argument if the smokers were majority it would be perfectly right for them to impose a law that says all facilities must be smoking?
If you can agree with that as I've said before that's pretty sad, if you can't agree with it then you're a hypocrite.
It's a little hard to "choose" a non-smoking motel (the topic of this thread, remember) if there isn't one available. It's hard to "choose" a non-smoking work environment if one isn't available.
No one is harmed by not being able to smoke, neither the smoker nor the non-smoker. Smoking is an "optional" activity.
The above from the person complaining about "Defelction". Unfortunately people need to make choices in life they don't want too, welcome to the real world. It's a simple yes or no question, I don't expect a straight answer though because I'm sure you can see where this is heading.
coalman: To answer your question, it is not possible to avoid a smoking establishment if it is the only such establishment available to you. The burden should be on the smokers, not the other way around!
coalman: To answer your question, it is not possible to avoid a smoking establishment if it is the only such establishment available to you. The burden should be on the smokers, not the other way around!
Sounds to e like you need to grow up and realize you're not always going to get what you want.
I thought of this debate today, while sharing a smoking break with the local Sheriff... he was hiding in the corner of our shared courtyard (more like the back of a parking lot) with a cigarette, and when I joined he said "Feels like we're doing something criminal, huh? Might as well be shooting up heroin, the way they treat smoking these days!" Funny yet scary coming from a gigantic ex-marine, with a Sheriff's badge and gun strapped to his hip.
He also told me about a recent memo from the Department, stating that no smoking in view of public citizens was to be tolerated anymore. I get that cops are role models to kids, so it kinda makes sense to bar them from smoking on duty... but that's not really about health (at least not in the present), it's more about maintaining a certain image. Just another example of the direction this country is headed, IMO.
The point is that smoking bans mean there are risks I do not have to accept.
You don't have to take the risk of entering a smoking establishment either. Just as with a tunnel, there are alternatives you can take.
The point is that if your position is based upon the principle that all SHS, in any quantity, is a health risk, you need to be consistent and avoid it in every circumstance. Otherwise, your position looks false and contrived.
It appears smoking areas are more profitable, and casinos battle to preserve them.
So people who smoke also lose more money gambling.
After they buy cigarettes and lose money gaming, how much is left over for food and shelter, I wonder?
Some interesting observations:
"Floor maps posted on the walls of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino and the Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort showed smoking was prohibited in the physical space occupied by gaming tables and slot machines, but allowed in the area immediately around them, including the seats."
"But in Trump Marina, one pair of slot machines on the floor’s Monte Carlo Casino area sit next to each other, each with a sign above them. One says 'Smoking Permitted,' the other reads 'No Smoking Permitted.' "
"The only other nonsmoking signs at Resorts are found on the craps tables. Players are restricted from smoking on one side of the table, but can puff away on the other side of the same table."
And, of course, smokers were smoking in non-smoking areas in almost all the casinos.
Some states do ban smoking in casinos:
"Different markets have different policies. In commercial-casino states such as New Jersey, only four of 14 states outlaw smoking entirely. Eight of the 14 states have no smoking restrictions on the casino floors, including Nevada and Indiana."
So four states do ban casino smoking.
For the casinos, a big issue is loss of business from a state that bans smoking to a nearby one that does not.
If bans were in place everywhere, that would not be a problem.
And the smokers who want to smoke anywhere will do it. Which is why partial bans in sleeping areas of hotels do not work, either.
Let me get this straight: Since non-smoking casino's are losing money to neighboring states which allow smoking, the solution is to make those other states go non-smoking too?
What a great idea! That way, they can ALL lose money! That's insane.
Away for a day and I come back to two pages of posts -- including what looks like well over a dozen by "SuzyQ" and "Katiana."
Katiana, it's fun watching you continue to complain about people "deflecting" from the main discussion while you yourself have continuously avoided the main question posed to you: cite and defend even just a few specific scientific studies that are freely available online showing any real harm to health that would come to people from staying in a hotel where some rooms allowed smoking.
Without that, all you've got are your obviously extreme "feelings" about a distaste for smoke and off-topic comments about the harm of smoking to smokers themselves.
SuzyQ:
1) I asked for a study and you offered one that you'd read only the Abstract for and which was not available on the net for the readers here to inspect unless they all wanted to lay down $30 each to purchase it. You've spent multi-posts justifying your choice of this study you haven't read and seem to be incapable of offering another in its place. That in and of itself says a lot about the paucity of real evidence out there supporting a need for these sorts of bans.
2) You have found a case where several workers were sickened to some degree by conditions in a tunnel filled with the pollution of thousands of cars and where the air is changed only once every 90 minutes. Somehow you are trying to argue that this shows that the "pollution" from a few cigarettes in a hotel room that you're not even in poses a danger to you, or that the "pollution" from a dozen or so people smoking in a bar with complete air changes every 3 to 5 minutes is more dangerous than the air in those car-filled tunnels with air changes every 90 minutes. I really don't know of any rational response to such a claim.
3) You claim that "partial bans in sleeping areas of hotels do not work" because "smokers who want to smoke anywhere will do it." Again, I can't come up with a rational response.
4) Instead of a proper study, you reference an unsigned blog entry about an unreferenced study carried out by an antismoking organization in Lebanon about tunnel air quality and dedicated water pipe smoking restaurants. The article, as is usual with these sorts of things, concentrates on a single emission, FPM 2.5, something that would generally be called "smoke," and finds that there can be more of it in a smoking den than in a car tunnel. Of course it doesn't examine anything ELSE that might be present -- because for all the other measurements the dedicated smoking restaurants in Lebanon would probably look just fine in the comparison. Oh, and to top it off, the article includes some of those wonderful pictures of lungs that are supposedly blackened on the OUTSIDE by people who generally inhale the smoke to those lungs' INSIDES. LOL! "Suzy," you do know I hope that antismoking educators like to use pig's lungs painted black for these sorts of things?
5) And finally, Suzy seems to focus inordinately on a study done back before World War II that looked at smokers vs. nonsmokers: absolutely NOTHING of any relevance to a thread about someone smoking somewhere in another room in a hotel where any concerned nonsmoker might be staying. Surprisingly I didn't notice Katiana chiding Suzy for "deflecting," but that may be because Katiana is reading through the "mountain of studies" that would support hotel bans so she can offer them to us for analysis.
Let me get this straight: Since non-smoking casino's are losing money to neighboring states which allow smoking, the solution is to make those other states go non-smoking too?
What a great idea! That way, they can ALL lose money! That's insane.
Heh, Still, they call it "the level playing field," and it's been in the Antismokers' strategy books since at least the late 90s. The idea is to get partial bans that seem "reasonable" as "compromises," (e.g., bans in "family restaurants" where they can hold up the bugaboo of the dying children who are stuffing themselves with McWhoppers) and then, when those businesses start to suffer they can grab onto them as allies in pushing for wider bans.
It's a decent strategy, and hard to fight unless you stop them as early as possible. One of the give-aways that this is going on is when you start seeing press-released news articles where the owners of the banned places all start gushing about how their business has improved SOOO much since the ban was imposed on them. Now think about this and use your common sense for a moment: if you were one of those owners, and if you were telling the truth about this sudden business advantage you had, then would you REALLY want to see all your competitors also forced to ban smoking so that your new found customers could then start going to THEM instead of to your place?
Funny how that question never seems to come up in those articles, eh?
The black market is more than fledgling already. And organized crime is involved.
Gaming is also associated with organized crime. If we should lower taxes on cigarettes because a high tax promotes crime, should we ban gambling because it promotes crime?
Actually, gaming WAS banned in most places for many years because of that very concern. But, the states finally decided that potential tax revenues offset the threat of crime and legalized it. That's the same thinking which went into the end of prohibition and the states have been raking in the dough ever since.
Ultimately, the question comes down to whether or not prohibition (in this case, tobacco) is worth the rise in criminal activity and the loss of tax dollars.
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What if a business owner really would like to ban smoking to protect its employees, lower its health care cost, reduce absenteeism, and not have to deal with the additional janitorial, maintenance, and logistics of separate smoking and non-smoking areas, but the employer is afraid he will lose business to a competitor if he does so. That is the reasoning that the casinos use to prevent bans.
It's called free market enterprise. Let the market decide. You do believe in free enterprise, don't you?
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A government ban that is universally applied makes it easier for the business. Competition then boils down to providing the best service, not whether you let people smoke inside or not.
Providing a smoking or non-smoking environment IS a service and IS a factor in competition. Your post about casino's losing business illustrates that perfectly.
Suggesting that making every place non-smoking would be "helping" the business owners is a bit like saying the presence of the Gestapo lurking around the corner "helps" people obey the law.
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That is why we have to teach nutrition in the schools and bring back mandatory physical education. "Recess" is not an elective. Children are learning bad nutrition from parents who have no clue how to feed their children. A family doc I know recently told me about a mom who was trying to feed hamburgers and French fries to a six month old baby. That woman did not have a clue about how to take care of a baby, and the child ended up in the hospital.
You may decry the "nanny state", but we are all paying the price for the obesity epidemic. That makes it an issue that is a legitimate area for governmental concern.
You can be smart and still be ignorant about nutrition. Ignorance is remedial.
And what's the next step after education doesn't work?
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For Katiana and SuzyQ...
