Poll: Smoking laws in Texas (condo, pharmacist, property)

[KathrynAragon]

I never will forget something that happened to me about twenty five years ago. I lived in military housing and I lived on a second floor (out of four floors). The woman who lived above me was Korean and she constantly was making kimchee and other things made out of cabbage. If you've ever smelled kimchee you know that it's a very permeating odor, and I could smell it often throughout my house. However, who was I to criticize this woman for cooking her own ethnic foods? So of course I never said anything about it.

Well, one day, a friend of mine visited. Now, I don't smoke, and I had an infant at the time, so I opened the window in the dining room and we sat beside it and she smoked and blew her smoke out the window. We were having a grand time talking together.

About fifteen minutes later, there was a banging on my door and I opened it to find a very irate Korean woman talking loudly and gesturing. It took me a few minutes to understand that she was saying that my friend's cigarette smoke stank and she could smell it from her apartment!

OMG.

[theSUBlime]

^ Ooooh yes, I have smelled kimchi before! Woah. That's really funny. I guess everyone has smells they can't do.

Kills me though that Texans are perfectly OK with HOAs, especially in Houston and we do have a smoking ban in most of the major cities. Inconsistent, my fellow Texans. Guess it always depends on the situation, when the government isn't doing it.

[Komeht]

Pole smoking has been legal since Lawrence v. Texas

[Michael J. McFadden]

Kathryn, your posting brought back memories! When I was first writing about this topic on the national usenet back in the early 1990s there was a poster on alt.smokers who would often argue that kimchee smells were far more offensive than cigarette smoke. I know that for my own part I *often* find frying food smells to be particularly sickening.

Now what would be interesting, if you could find the funding to hire someone with the necessary equipment and skills, would be to isolate a number of the toxins released during the preparation of kimchee and translate them into "cigarette equivalents." Antismokers generally don't like that sort of comparison because it almost always makes them look bad unless they measure their pet "invented" pollutant: PM 2.5 -- something that was VERY rarely talked about until the Antis made it popular in the 90s. It's produced almost solely by burning organic matter, so it gives them *wonderful* multiplicative figures for being able to say "Oh the air in this place with smoking has 7.3 times the 'air pollution' of this other place where smoking is banned." When they make that sort of statement, all it really boils down to is "There's more SMOKE in a place that allows SMOKIING." -- but it'd be hard to grab headlines if the research was expressed in that form, eh?

[Michael J. McFadden]

Actually, here's an example from the "Stratistics"* chapter of TobakkoNacht:

===

The “Commander Almost Zero Fallacy”

The best example of this stratistical weapon can be seen when the presence of an expected element in a smoking environment (such as “smoke” or “nicotine”) is compared to the presence of that element in a nonsmoking environment. It is then “revealed” that the smoking environment has five times, or ten times, or even 53 times the amount of that element as the nonsmoking one.


If a smoker’s home contains 53 times as much of a deadly toxin as a nonsmoker’s home it seems like a good reason not to bring your precious young one into such an environment. But once you realize that the amount in the nonsmoking environment is, quite literally, almost zero, then you might also realize that 53 times almost zero is still going to be ... almost zero. It’s like trying to frighten people into never taking showers by telling them that homes with shower-takers have 53 times as much deadly chlorine gas in them (evaporating from healthily chlorinated, bacteria-free tap water) as homes where nobody but a bunch of grubby, long haired, non-showering hippies live.


We saw this trick used in 2009 when ... groups were pushing colleges around the country to follow up on classroom and dormitory smoking bans with bans covering the entirety of their outdoor campuses – even to the far corners of parking lots enshrouded in clouds of engine exhaust! The background, usually unstated, justification for such pressure was that the bans would “foster campus and community environments that promote healthy lifestyles…” ...


As part of that effort, the University of Georgia produced a study supposedly showing that simply being around smokers would boost your blood nicotine (actually cotinine, the nicotine metabolite found in blood) level to over 150% higher than the levels of those who avoided such exposure. It isn’t until you read the study itself that you’d find out that it compared a group of test subjects who sat around outside in a location nowhere near any smokers to a group that sat right in the middle of crowds of smokers in smoke pits outside of smoke-banned bars for six hours straight on busy Friday nights.


I took the figures from the Georgia study and computed what the level of exposure would actually be if a waiter worked every Friday night on the crowded smoking patio of a college bar where indoor smoking had been banned. It turns out that the waiter would have to work in such conditions for roughly 100 years to get the equivalent exposure of smoking a single pack of cigarettes.


Levels of exposure that were a bit more normal on a campus, say, walking through clumps of smokers at doorways or maybe sitting on a bench several times a week while a couple of smokers smoked on a bench nearby, would be far lower. A hapless student might have to wander around such a “smoke-filled” campus for almost a thousand times as long – a hundred thousand years of Friday nights – to enjoy the equivalent of smoking a single pack of cigarettes or a couple of marijuana joints.

====

So, as you can see, this particular stat trick fave of the Antismokers gets a lot of mileage out there!

*Stratistics is the term I used to refer to the deliberate misuse of statistics for strategic purposes.

[TexasReb]

=theSUBlime;31775919] Just curious. Can anyone think of redeeming qualities for being smoking (or being obese)?

No, I admit I can't think of any redeeming qualities for being a smoker or being obese. Just like I can't think of any redeeming qualities about over-salting your food, or wearing too much perfume/cologne in a public place that could possibly cause an allergic reaction to other patrons around the culprit. And so on...

More wrong than not allowing smokers to subject others to their smoke, in my opinion, is the fact that they are taxed so heavily in certain states. Like I said, you have rights until you start fringing upon others' first[/b].

With all due respect, your opening statements seem to contradict one another. What exactly are you saying here?. Just asking. So to get to the gist of the matter, how did/would you answer the poll question itself? That would clarify quite a bit, I think...

But you are clear and correct in one regard, for sure. That is, we all have rights that definitely stop when they infringe on those of others. Ala', the proverbial "hollering fire in a crowded theatre", or -- and I would agree -- that it would constitute a criminal assault if someone were to go up to another person and deliberately blow smoke in their face.

BUT? The above scenarios are not applicable. It simply comes down to a matter of taking responsibility for one's own health and choices. If you don't want to be subjected to second-hand smoke? Then fer gawds sake, don't go into a place that allows it. From another angle, if someone who doesn't like smoking knowingly enters a place where it is permitted? Then who is to really to blame for any personal health issues that might come up later?

Just don't go into a place where smoking is allowed.

Like has been said by many posters earlier. When it comes right down to it? No, it is not so much about smoking or obecity, or whatever, but about controlling the choices of others and stomping out private property rights (And there will always be the share of "useful idiots" to sheeple along). And it will never stop. As I have seen unfold in my own hometown and THL and others have described in Austin, these zealots are insatiable. To try and compromise is a fool's errand. They are deliberate liars, and whiners, and their record of what they piously present originally as being something carefully constructed to appeal to all sides? Well, it has a way of metamorphosing into what the real intent was the whole time. It might take a little time to get there -- depending on the locale -- but it does and nothing refutes this truth.

[KathrynAragon]

My brother and his wife owned an Irish pub in Ohio - a little local joint that was packed with regulars every night.

Then the No Smoking laws were enacted.

Within a year, they had to close all week nights.

Within two years, they were out of business. They couldn't make it through the long, cold, rainy season when patrons would have to go outside to smoke rather than sit at the bar.

Clearly, in this scenario, the smokers outnumbered the non smokers. But no matter!

I agree with Reb - if you don't want to be around smoke, don't go to establishments that allow smoking. But should a place be effectively shut down simply because the majority of the patrons want to smoke?

[TexasHorseLady]

I would like an honest answer to this question, from those who answered the poll that there should be no smoking anywhere in public.

If there are both smoking allowed and non-smoking allowed venues.

If there are sufficient employees who smoke to man the former.

What is your justification for saying that people who smoke, both patrons and employees, may not have a place to gather away from the anti-smokers? Don't they have just as much right to be away from annoyances on their nights out (or at work) as you do?

[KathrynAragon]

I say that free enterprise is the answer. If there's a market for smoke free and/or smoke filled establishments, then they will open and stay in business.

[lonestar2007]

Entirely too many people out there who simply cannot tend to their own business and that's the problem in a nutshell. Holy smokes, deliver us from these overzealous folks!

BTW I do not smoke, nor do I care to have smoke blown in my face, but hey, I don't have a problem with that happening and it's such an easy thing to manage. As has been said over and over, just stay out of the places where smoke offends you and go to places that don't offend you. So frigging simple!

But it will never happen because of the Big I syndrome that is ever increasing. I get so tired of it, but it's not going away. The Big I people are the loudest and the most obnoxious and you know what they say . . the squeaky wheel is the one that gets oiled.

So there you have it. The Big I's will always be with us, demanding that everything they find offensive be banned and they will have all the data to support why it should be and they won't stopped until everyone is living just like they want to live, so we can all be a bunch of clones. Sickening. More freedom being flushed down the toilet, coming a day no one will have to worry about it. All you loudmouths who demand everyone conform to you will have had your way. Hopefully I won't be around to ask you . . How do you like it now?