City sends message to adults - you are grownups and can make adult choices

[The Straight Story]

Another Valley City Passes Smoking Ban

The Florence City Council has passed a new bill banning smoking in most public places, and giving restaurant owners 30 days to decide whether or not they want to shut smokers out.

By a 5-1 vote Tuesday night, the council approved the ban, that was proposed by Mayor Bobby Irons and Council member James Barnhart. The bill is modeled after the smoking resolution passed in Huntsville a few years ago. It bans smoking in public places like offices, stores, parks and restaurants. However, restaurants and lounges can allow customers to light up, but an establishment that allows smoking can't let anyone younger than 18 into the premesis without a parent or guardian.

The lone dissenting vote was from Councilman Barry Morris. He said the law was unnecessary and people should be able to make their own decisions and said people should vote with their feet, and not go in certain restaurants if they don't like to be around smoke.

http://www.waaytv.com/Global/story.asp?S=11031927

The city is allowing some businesses the ability to decide - wow, a freedom like concept that seems so rare in the safety bubble wrap folks keep putting around everything.

Maybe more cities will learn 'our body, our choice' does not just apply to one issue.

[Swede]

1. Yeah,let's get rid of seatbelt and helmet laws,too.

nt

[Hello_Kitty]

3. There's no helmet law in my state.

And seatbelt laws make sense because they are not only to protect your life but they make the driver better able to control the vehicle in the event of a collision because they and the passengers aren't flying through the windshield.

[The Straight Story]

4. When you are on government owned roads, they make the rules, in your own bar nannies make the rules

I don't get the fear of freedom of choice so many people have.

Like having the church run our lives and putting more and more laws on the books to keep us from sinning or living a way of life they just don't approve of.

[Swede]

8. And who cares about the waiting staff inhaling all the smoke.

There are jobs everywhere,let them find another.

[The Straight Story]

9. That's why I don't clean monkey cages for a living, found something I liked more

Although the monkeys might be more fun to hang with than geeks.

[noamnety]

10. That's a great argument for sweat shops and no OSHA compliance.

Don't like it? Leave.

(Of course, often there are no other choices, but we can pretend sweat shop workers are there entirely of their own free will. They LIKE working in conditions that make them ill.)

[The Straight Story]

16. There are many differences though

For one, not smoking places people have to go - like schools, hospitals, grocery stores versus people never need to go to (bars) and are privately owned.

On the worker side I am all for sensible regulation. But it can be overdone.

Critical businesses must exist and have staff (power companies, grocery stores, utility companies, government offices for permits/etc, and so on).

Bars do not have to exist.

[noamnety]

17. I missed your point.

OSHA standards apply to public and private business work conditions for employees, whether or not the businesses have to exist - I'm not sure why you are singling out public sector places and addressing it from the point of view of consumers.

That's why my comparison was to sweat shops - those are places that are privately owned, nobody has to work there (unless you get into actual realities of capitalism), they aren't any different from bars in terms of people voluntarily taking a job there. Don't like working there? Don't feel safe there? Sure, go be unemployed, have fun when that runs out.

Workplace safety laws are in effect so that the people who voluntarily take jobs - as is the norm - have protection: hearing protection, clean air protection, safety equipment requirements, etc.

[seabeyond]

14. ok. nt

[madokie]

2. Maybe require a line on the sign that says this place allows smoking

being a non-smoker for 32 years now I know I'd pass on the establishments who allow smoking as I find tobacco smoke as stinking. After I've been around someone who smokes I can smell the tobacco on my clothes and on my body. I'm all for letting a person smoke if they want but I don't allow smoking in our house, go outside if you must do that. Pass that joint or bowl though and I'll light it right up :-)

[rucky]

5. The smoking bars will be way more fun than the nonsmoking ones. n/t

[seabeyond]

15. all my anti smoking friends that cant stand smokers following me around as i try to get away

from them when i want a cig. i tell them, go away. i am having a cig. they shrug and say.... doesnt matter

wtf...

i listened to lecture on how just seeing someone smoke gives them cancer, ... now doenst matter

just dont take them too seriously anymore in their messed up outrage

[rucky]

19. how many of 'em try to bum one?

that's what cracks me up the most. it's almost inevitable, when you're drinking with friends.

[onethatcares]

6. maybe we should stop subsidizing

Phillip Morris and the rest of the tobacco growers. I mean, let's start at the top of the food chain and put the CEOs in jail for selling harmful products.

They've managed to foist that crap on marijuana users for ages.

[jmowreader]

11. Tobacco "subsidies" have been gone for years

The tobacco "subsidies" were called the Tobacco Farm Stabilization Program. Here's how it worked:

Before anyone could grow tobacco for sale, they needed a quota for the kind of tobacco they were growing. It was absolutely illegal to grow tobacco without one, or to sell more than your quota allowed. Let's say you had a quota for 1000 pounds of flue-cured leaf. You couldn't sell more than that, and you couldn't sell anything but that--if your quota was for flue-cured tobacco, you couldn't grow burley or cigar wrapper. And you couldn't call the Stabilization Cooperative and ask for quota on burley if you wanted to grow some because the government was forbidden to raise the total outstanding quota; you had to rent or buy someone else's quota. (Quota was a commodity that could be traded; people who didn't even live in the South but who had inherited quota made a decent side income by leasing their quota to active farmers.)

Okay, so now you're a tobacco farmer who has 1500 pounds of leaf and 1000 pounds of quota. You store 500 pounds of leaf in burlap wrappers, and haul the other thousand pounds to the auction barn. The extra 500 pounds of tobacco will be fine until next year--it's actually better tasting if you age it for a year or so to leach out some of the ammonia, which is a natural product of tobacco curing. Anyway, you go to auction and the cigarette manufacturers examine your offering. Eventually your tobacco will come up to the auction block. There is a minimum price for it--the "stabilization price." Let's say it's $1.40 per pound. Stabilization price is the bidding floor; no cigarette company can bid less than that. If your tobacco doesn't receive bids over $1.40 per pound, the Tobacco Stabilization Cooperative, which is owned by the tobacco farmers, purchases your tobacco and sells it to cigarette companies as they need it. If Lorillard bids $1.42 per pound they go home with your tobacco.

Stabilization did two things: kept megagrowers from flooding the market with tobacco hence shutting out the small farmers, and ensured the farmer would earn a living from his work.

After stabilization was ended--the government bought everyone's quota--tobacco went to a more-typical contract growing system. Tobacco buyers purchase futures contracts on, say, 1000 pounds of flue-cured from Farmer Smith for delivery at the end of the tobacco season. The auction barns have become receiving stations: when the farmer has cured his crop, he delivers it to a receiving station for his consignee and is paid on the spot.

Here's the thing: tobacco farmers, especially flue-cured growers, are increasingly getting out of growing it. It is a VERY labor intensive crop, there's not much profit in it and the flue-cured tobacco grown in the Carolinas is dependent on electricity to power the curing barn blowers--which is never guaranteed to be there when they need it, because tobacco curing time is at the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season. Every time a hurricane comes through the Carolinas and knocks out the electricity, every tobacco farmer down here loses his entire crop in the curing barns. (If the blowers go out before the crop is cured, it gets moldy and has to be discarded.) Farmers who grow burley, which is cured in open barns, aren't affected by losing power--but the burley belt is in Kentucky.

[Hannah Bell]

12. interesting, thanks.

[onethatcares]

13. thank you, I apologize for mis stating my position.

basically because I didn't understand the system.

I should have said; "Let's take all the cigarette manufacturing company CEOs and put them in jail for selling a known to be harmful product".

[jmowreader]

18. Now THAT I can agree with!

[laughingliberal]

7. We have one restaurant in my part of the state that did not ban smoking

I was surprised when I went in after the ban on smoking in restaurants went into effect here (NV) and was asked, 'smoking or non-smoking?' I asked how it was possible they still allowed smoking and they said they banned children. As this restaurant is in a casino, I think that's totally appropriate anyway. I smoke so it did not bother me. Those who don't care for it have the choice of anywhere else they want to go eat.