Pennsylvania May Expand Smoking Ban to All Clubs and Bars

[onehandle]

There are still places in Pennsylvania where you can light up a cigarette publicly — but it appears even those few places are about to go away.

The Pennsylvania House is considering a bill that would eliminate most exemptions from the 2008 state law that banned most public smoking. NewsWorks says the new ban would extend to all bars, hotels, and private clubs. There appears to be little opposition to the bill.

Vaping at those locations would also be banned, under the bill.

http://www.phillymag.com/news/2015/06/22/state-may-expand-smoking-ban-to-all-clubs-and-bars

[tridim]

1. How can they ban vaping under a "smoking" ban?

Vaping is NOT smoking and it never will be.

Might as well ban grapefruit and toilet paper as well, it makes the same amount of sense.

[we can do it]

5. Right, everyone has the right to blow formaldehyde in a room with other people.

[tridim]

6. The RJR propaganda department thanks you for your ignorance. nt

[Runningdawg]

7. You get more vapor

from an open bottle of nail polish. Now pass the gatorade.

[meow2u3]

10. Swallowing anti-vaping lies whole?

[beevul]

11. In fact, they do.

Formaldehyde is a naturally occurring chemical; our bodies even produce minimal amounts of formaldehyde. However, at high concentrations, formaldehyde vapors are dangerous.

http://www.lung.org/healthy-air/home/resources/formaldehyde.html

You DO think breathing is a right, yes?

Now factually establish 'high concentrations', otherwise, you haven't much of a point.

[Michael J. McFadden]

17. High Concentrations?

If I may join in...

I believe "High Concentrations" are defined by OSHA.

I also believe that the highest concentration increases in formaldehyde from "secondhand vapor" measured in a normal room setting are well below 1% of the OSHA standards, and may not have ever even risen to measurable levels at all. The one study I looked at closely concerning this had a very difficult time distinguishing between the amount of formaldehyde being pumped into the air by Breathers (those nasty stinking two-legged mammals we see running around so many public places) and the amount being produced by Vapers (i.e. Breathers who are also vaping.)

To see a bit more of the kind of research that's used to attack vaping with arguments like this formaldehyde one, see the brief excerpt from "TobakkoNacht -- The Antismoking Endgame" at the bitly link for FDAstudy (I'm new here, so I'm guessing I can't post the actual link? Should be OK to indicate it this way though, no? Feel free to email me at Cantiloper on the gmail system if you can't find it and would like to.)

And to see what you'd get in the real world, go to Schripp's study AT wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1600-0668.2012.00792.x/full and use the figures from Table 5 to calculate the formaldehyde concentration you'd get in a small, poorly ventilated bar (say 10Mx3Mx4M w/5ach) if you had a party of WVs (Wild Vapers) in there vaping away with each one taking a puff every minute. See how many WVs could safely party away all night long in that small bar.

My *guess* would be several hundred... but l'll invite a less biased participant to try the figuring.

- MJM

[MADem]

33. You are free to post links AND four paragraphs of text.

Anything much past that is questionable in terms of copyright. The Terms of Service here are pretty simple--there's a link to them at the bottom of the page if you are interested. Each forum has guidelines, too, but they're pretty straightforward as well, and are linked at the top of each forum's main page.

[Michael J. McFadden]

36. I wrote the text and have full copyright through AEthna Press...

for both "Dissecting Antismokers' Brains" and "TobakkoNacht -- The Antismoking Endgame"! Close to 900 pages, 275,000 words in all, with roughly a thousand reference citations.

See: http://TobakkoNacht.com and http://antibrains.com

(Oh! OK... I think you were referring to my confusion about the links. Somehow when I put my first post up -- the one I self-deleted -- the links didn't seem to appear, so I thought there might be a "safety mechanism" for new posters as a spam protection!)


Michael

[MADem]

37. If you have full copyright and say so, you can post more than four paragraphs, easily.

You have to watch for accusations of spamming if you post the same thing over and over, but if it's your own work, there's no restriction.

The site owners here got into a dustup with this asshole copyright troll who bought the "right to sue" re: copyrights and sued website owners for the actions of posters as a profit-making scheme. The site owners won the case and slammed the suers but good, but they are quite naturally cautious and respectful of copyright. They like us to stick with FAIR USE if it's not our own material. You can read about the case here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Righthaven_LLC_v._Democratic_Underground_LLC

At the bottom of your posts, you'll see CHECK SPELLING PREVIEW POST MY REPLY. The preview button will show you how your post will look--if you see something you don't like, you can fix it before you hit the POST button.

[Michael J. McFadden]

38. And thanks again...

Thank you muchly MADem!

I think it would be pretty rare that I'd quote my past writings that extensively in a post. People following discussion threads like this are usually looking to see direct answers to direct questions ... if they wanted to read a thousand words of blather there are plenty of places on the Net to find it. :> I think readers are usually looking for quick tidbits of new information scattered amidst a bit of "blood 'n guts" that lets them see which side of an argument can be better supported when it's questioned or attacked. Long diatribes and ad hominems are ignored, and don't really add anything constructive to a topic discussion thread.

Back when I was active on the alt.smokers Internet Newsgroup in the 1990s, there was a fellow who tried to bury constructive discussions by posting extensive largely off-topic pastes from dozens of medical journals to the board every day. While the regulars eventually put him on ignore his goal was really just to discourage new readers from sticking around and seeing any of the more more important "meat and potatoes" aspects of the discussions. It's very destructive tactic, simply trying to increase the "noise to signal" ratio, and is one of the few times I generally approve of board moderator censorship.

I look forward to being active here at DU. I just recently discovered it and it looks like you've got some good discussions here!


MJM
P.S. Glad to see you handed the sucker's butt back to him on a platter! :>

[meow2u3]

9. We're dealing with politicians who are either ignorant

or on the take and in bed with the drug companies and/or the other authoritarians, the nicotine prohibitionists, who cannot be reasoned with.
The unholy trinity of Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, and the tobacco control lobby are redoubling their efforts to eliminate the competition called vapor products because vapor products are cutting into their profit margins. \
The more people take up vaping, the fewer there are who are smoking, so the tobacco industry wants to ban or severely restrict vaping. Big Pharma wants to outlaw vaping because their NRT products don't work and vapers know it. Tobacco control doesn't know how to react to e-cigs, so they ignorantly--or arrogantly--conflate them with traditional cigs because vaping put a monkey wrench in their ideological crusade to create a smoke-free society, so now they changed their tactics and are now on a relentless propaganda campaign designed to dissuade smokers from switching to vapor products by lying about them, defaming vapers in the process.

[beevul]

2. "Vaping at those locations would also be banned, under the bill."

What an utterly dumb thing to do.

Oh well, at least the bunch that can't stand to see anyone else doing something and enjoying it will be happy.

On second thought, they're never happy

[Hoppy]

3. What about da casinos?

[Michael J. McFadden]

18. Casino losses are harder to hide...

... so the politicians are more hesitant to give in to antismoking pressure when noncasino taxpayers get annoyed at things like increased property taxes. The tax losses from bans in bars tend to be spread out over several years as bars close and people go on unemployment etc, but casino takes are very carefully watched over by the Taxman.

You'll still see Antismokers try to cover the losses up with studies that do things like measure the number of people walking in the casino front doors (including the smokers coming back for the fifth time from a smoke break) and then use those numbers to claim "More Customers!" (Yeah, right.) But the money losses are too concentrated and too immediate to really hide. British blogger Dick Puddlecote just devoted a pretty well-written blog entry to the subject, complete with some nice references and a graph of what happened in the State of Illinois, and if you're really interested in the casino question you might want to read it at dickpuddlecote.blogspot and then enter "New Orleans Casino Loses Millions To The Surprise Of Nobody" for the June 14th entry.

I actually went to Atlantic City during the New Jersey ban fight over bars and tried to convince the Casino Association's second-in-command that if they didn't support the bars in fighting the ban that the casinos would get hit in the next step. The idiot laughed in my face and said, "Mr. McFadden, I'm sorry, but you simply don't understand. We are FAR too big in this state for them to ever touch us with one of those bans!"

Two years later, smoking was banned in the casinos with a grudging exception made just for 25% of the gaming floors. For the first year in its 30-odd year history of year-after-year-after-year growth... Atlantic City casino revenue went down, and I believe it has stayed down every single year since. Three years ago a brand new casino, REVEL, opened up and declared itself "Smoke Free!" -- After all, as the only "smoke-free" casino in the entire state, it'd be a sure bet (no pun intended) to make a mint, right?

It went bankrupt in two years... even in its perfect, beautiful, isolated niche among all the other Atlantic City casinos.

So my guess is that while the Antismokers may make a token effort to get PA's casinos under their thumb, they'll offer it up as a "reasonable compromise" in order to swallow the bars. Of course if they get the bar ban they'll simply come back the following year with the warcries about "The ONLY workers in the ENTIRE STATE who are FORCED to breathe POISONOUS air just so that they can FEED THEIR CHILDREN!" (Forgive the caps... they're there for verisimilitude.)

If the PA casino bosses have any brains they'll do everything in their power to preserve or expand the exemption for bars -- otherwise they'll most definitely be next on the menu.

- MJM

[Hoppy]

30. Your facts about AC casinos are correct. Your interpretation is not.

A.c. Casinos began a slight decline when the Yonkers Racion opened. The major decline began when three casinos opened in Pa. It's simple. If the purpose is to gamble, would you rather drive one or two hours to A.c. or 45 minutes to Pa.

Revel's closing was due in part to the non-smoking but was also due to its location as the most difficult to drive to. Four other smoking casinos also closed.

People are now used to leaving a drink or a meal to go outdoors to smoke. A casino is no different.

[bigwillq]

4. I don't really have any issue with a ban in public establishments

but I think a ban in hotels and in private clubs is a bit excessive.

We have a ban in CT in public establishments, and I don't mind it. And I smoke. If I want to smoke, I can just go outside.

But there should be some exceptions, like a private club should be able to choose if they want smoking inside their establishment or not.

[Arugula Latte]

8. Re: hotels...Smoke doesn't stay in one place. I've been in a "smoke free" hotel room

and just about choked from smoke drifting into the room from an outside smoker. Also, when people have smoked in a room and then it becomes "smoke free" the stink never goes away until the carpet is replaced and the whole room is repainted.

[Michael J. McFadden]

19. The More Things Change....

Argula, I've discussed hotel room smoking many times over the years while fighting smoking bans. Here's an excerpt from one of my books where I discussed an article that appeared in an October 1964 edition of The Christian Herald as presented by a foot-massaging reflexologist named Don Matchan in his unusual 1977 antismoking book, We Mind If You Smoke:

==

(The Herald) author lamented his travails of traveling to a hotel in New York City. Along every step of the way, from train cars to train stations to taxis to the hotel lobby and even in the elevator, he was assailed by clouds of smoke; until finally he hurries "to antisocially seek the privacy – and clean air – of my room. That room is the one place I can find with pure air."

The story is notable not just because of the rarity of having some-one express such extreme concern about random encounters with smoke at that point in history, but also because of the author’s vast relief at finally getting to the pure, clean air of his hotel room – a room almost certainly surrounded by other rooms filled with people smoking, and a room in which thousands had most definitely smoked in the past! But in the 1960s, even an extremist, a fanatic, a likely candidate for psychological counseling in that era, even such a person would never have thought of worrying about people smoking in other rooms or fretted over fears of previous smokers in the room they were currently occupying. With very few exceptions, the concept of being concerned about such things, or even noticing such things, was simply beyond rational thought even by crazy people in that period.

==

Today of course we live in a different world. But it's important to be aware that such perceptions, in the absence of the 500 to 800 million dollar a year MSA "Tobacco Control" campaign bolstered by the further tens or hundreds of millions coming from Big Pharma and the Big Charity fundraisers that play on images of children choking amidst clouds of smoke, that such perceptions would probably still be so rare that even the most extreme of activists would never even think to mention them.

Want some further evidence of how people's brains have been fiddled with in this area? Go to Google's NGrams tool and enter the phrase:

stunk of smoke

(just like that... no quotes. NGrams doesn't accept quotes: it assumes them) and you'll see that the concept of saying that a person or a room "stunk of smoke" pretty much didn't exist at all prior to 1964, and it didn't really take off until the Godber World Conference On Smoking And Health of 1975 -- the conference where they first proposed creating fear in nonsmokers as a social pressure tool into their stalled antismoking programs.

- MJM

[NRaleighLiberal]

20. wow. too bad you can't talk to my dad, who in his last years lamented that he ever took up the

filthy habit. He was addicted and admitted it. It shortened his life, took money from our family that didn't have much.

One of his few regrets was starting in the first place.

[Arugula Latte]

27. Smoking was everywhere in the 50s/60s/70s

People probably got used to the stench, yes.

But I can tell you that as a non-smoker, the stink is not in my imagination. I had a repairman come into my home one time, and I stopped in my tracks because he smelled so strongly of smoke, I was convinced he had a lit cigarette in his hand. But no, it was the fumes coming off his clothing and hair. It was overpowering. I don't know if you smoke, but I'm guessing that if you do, you have no idea how strong it can smell to an "outsider."

Smoking is a filthy, stinking habit. There is no getting around that.

There is also no getting around the fact that smoking has caused tens and tens of thousands of early deaths, and contributed to many cancers, strokes, heart attacks, and other diseases. It has also contributed to these diseases in non-smokers who have had to breathe in second-hand smoke.

[lpbk2713]

12. Probably wouldn't apply to skyboxes in athletic stadiums.

They wouldn't want to inconvenience the wealthy and privileged.

[Michael J. McFadden]

25. That Knock On The Door...

"They wouldn't want to inconvenience the wealthy and privileged."

The wealthy and privileged will learn their lesson -- as evidenced by the casinos and as sung by Phil Ochs in 1964:

Google:

"Knock On The Door" "Phil Ochs"

and listen.

It's also called the "Slice By Slice" technique for a worker wanting to steal a salami (i.e. "The Freedom Salami&quot from his boss. If he tries it all at once he'll be fired. But if he pops a slice in his mouth every afternoon no one will ever notice... and by the end of the year he'll have swallowed the whole salami.

Slices to come in this area (some partly swallowed already by this point): outdoor "smoking area" patios, beaches (due to the fire hazard, as noted by one well known NJ Antismoker several years ago on the Lynn Doyle radio show), cars with children (and then, "due to enforcement difficulties,&quot cars without children, condos, apartments, rowhomes, shopping district streets, city center streets... and eventually the fella sneaking a smoke on the backside of Ceres!

- MJM

[Ruby the Liberal]

13. Will they include Cigar Bars with their $25 shots of scotch/whiskey/brandy?

Because I can see that going over like a lead balloon in PA.

As far as vaping in hotel rooms? Let them catch me. Idiots. My work went smoke/vape free and all of the vapers just head to the loo for their 'smoke' breaks now. So far, not one complaint, not one person caught, not one person penalized. Odd that whole 'lack of smell/residue' thing...

[Logical]

24. You should be so proud. Nt

[Nuclear Unicorn]

14. Another dumb idea that won't change anything.

[Logical]

22. Lol, previous smoking bans changed a lot of things! Nt

[Go Vols]

35. Yes they have

We can only smoke in "over 21" establishments here now,which turned most of the bar/restaurants into kid free zones.

[Arugula Latte]

29. Smoking bans have been terrific -- a great success.

As a personal anecdote, when Oregon banned smoking in most public places our family started going to restaurants and bars we'd previously avoided because of the choking, stinking air.

[we can do it]

15. It fucking stinks and is fucking rude to do in a space with others.

Stink at home.

[Thor_MN]

21. Or in your car. And keep your butt in your car.

Smokers are the most prolific litterbugs that exist. If one enjoys smoking so much, the smell of a full ashtray should be enjoyable.

IMO, there should be $0.10 deposit on cigarette filters. If you don't return them, you forfeit the deposit.

[Logical]

23. So true, they throw out butts with no thought at all! Nt

[Travis_0004]

28. Then don't go there

I don't see the point in banning smoking in a private club. If you want your club to be smoke free, then join a smoke free club.

[we can do it]

31. Private smoking club - fine.

[MadrasT]

26. Laws and rules bundling vaping in with smoking is dumb as a box of rocks.

Oooooo it LOOKS similar so BAAAAD

Fucking Puritan assholes.

[beevul]

32. Well said.

[meow2u3]

34. You took the words right off my keyboard

Puritan assholes is right.