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Smoking Ban in USA - Legal or Not?

Author: seikoo
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This law supersedes all local laws everywhere in the United States, and the state's Department of Health will be monitoring compliance. This law even applies to truck drivers driving through the states! So where can you smoke, if you so choose?

You can no longer smoke in public buildings, and you cannot smoke in the adjacent areas to the entrances and exits where people might have to walk through the smoke. Although the law doesn't specify a distance, the Department of Health is recommending a 20-foot space between the two. In many buildings in Ohio, this means smokers will have to be on the other side of the street or well out into the parking areas. So the smokers are thrown out into the cold during the winter months to smoke - this doesn't seem fair!

There are a couple of exceptions that the Department of Health will have to remember during their monitoring. Nursing homes may establish a smoking room for their residents but not the visitors, and hotels can allocate up to 20% of their rooms as smoking rooms for those who want to smoke. But, then if I'm a smoker planning a vacation around a peak season, I might not even be able to find a room in the inn to stay because all of the non-smokers have taken up the space! Retail tobacco stores are also exempt, as long as 80% of their income comes from tobacco sales.

Businesses will accrue fines for breaking this new smoking ban law. All fine money will be put into a "Clean Air Ohio" fund and the proceeds will be used to reduce the effects of smoking on public health. One of the goals of the anti-smoking industry propaganda is to scare the smokers, and make us believe that we are a small portion of the overall population. This is not the necessarily the truth. Actually, smokers make up one of the biggest over-the-age-of-18 constituencies ever!

We have lost so many of our freedoms already - but how can they make a law telling smokers where I must spend my personal time to have a personal smoke break? Thomas Paine once said that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from opposition; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself.

Luckily, after a ban goes into effect, some bars will actually violate the bans, and the smart ones will find ways to skirt the smoking bans, other establishments will file for and get granted exemptions from the Department of Health. Although, bans are not immediately enforced by public officials all the time, some establishments will choose to raise their menu or other services prices to offset the loss of business they expect due to the fact that smokers who can't smoke will not frequent their places of business. For some smokers, this is actually a time when trying to quit smoking just so they can continue to frequent the same places seems to make sense.

Some try the argument that smoking will not negatively decrease sales in public bars and clubs. The argument is that since the population is made up of more non-smokers than smokers (and remember this is not necessarily true (this varies region by region) more people will frequent a business now that smoking is banned, therefore, sales will go up and a continual exponential effect will take place. It's not hard to tell that public places will be no more busy than normal after tomorrow's ban - smokers or no smokers.