Bars working around Nevada smoking ban

[The Straight Story]

Bars working around Nevada smoking ban
John Gurzinski / Las Vegas Review-Journal
Bilbo's Bar & Grill argued that its ashtrays were 1st Amendment-protected advertising - and lost.
Faced with losing food revenue or customers who light up to casinos exempt from the law, tavern owners tap their creativity.


LAS VEGAS -- Dale Wageman is the kind of barfly this city's taverns are desperate to woo. He likes to settle onto a bar stool each Saturday, glue himself to college football on the tube, and polish off beers. But to win him, Vegas bartenders must contend with his drinking buddy: a pack of USA Gold cigarettes.

A law voters approved a year ago has outlawed smoking in many business that sell food, including a number of bars and taverns. It drove Wageman to abandon his favorite watering hole.

To hang onto customers who smoke, bartenders have dreamed up all sorts of ways to evade the new rules. In lieu of now-prohibited ashtrays, they put out cups of water. They stock foil ashtrays in cigarette machines. They close their grills but, with a wink, hand out menus from nearby restaurants that will deliver to bar patrons.

The result has been a year of headaches for health officials untangling the Nevada Clean Indoor Air Act, a ballot initiative that seems to have left just enough wriggle room for bartender ingenuity. "They are trying to be imaginative so they can keep everything," said Stephen R. Minagil, the Southern Nevada Health District's attorney.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-smoking19nov19,0,1161591.story?coll=la-home-nation

[Lex1775]

1. Good for them.

Whatever loopholes they can find should be exploited and the info passed on.

[High Plains]

2. Hear, hear! To hell with the nanny state.

I'm pro-choice when it comes to smoking in bars. If the bar owner wants no smoking, so be it, and if he wants to allow smoking, so be it. I'm tired of all these people who never go into my bar telling me I can't smoke there.

[SpiralHawk]

4. The republicons love Big Daddy Government

Despite their propaganda to the contrary -- which is just more republicon lies.

[karlrschneider]

3. They just ignore the ban at the lakeside bar near here...even the sheriff deputies hang out & smoke

there. :-)

[ElboRuum]

5. Awesome. Simply Awesome. n/t

[Toasterlad]

6. "They are trying to be imaginative so they can keep everything,"

Imagine! The nerve of letting bar owners decide what to do in their own bars! Someone has to protect those innocent patrons who might accidentally wander in, and not be able to find their way out again in the smoke-filled haze! In the meantime, they're breathing in dangerous smoke in quanities that might take up to a whole second off their lives! I trust everyone is in a positive DITHER about this!

[Nye Bevan]

7. I feel sorry for the waitstaff

I wouldn't be very happy if *my* employer figured out a "loophole" by which he could force me to inhale noxious, disease-causing fumes throughout my workday. And I am *not* comfortable with the attitude "if you don't like it, get another job"-- who knows if they could, in this economy?

[Viva_La_Revolution]

8. If smoke bothers them, why did they apply there in the first place? nt

[Nye Bevan]

9. Perhaps they believed that the smoking ban would actually ban smoking?

Or maybe there were no other job openings available?