Quote:
|
Originally Posted by raveneye
As a performing musician in Miami, I've played in clubs before the current ban and after, and I much prefer the ban. After gigs all my equipment stank for days, and I probably inhaled enough second hand smoke to add up to a pack per gig.
I see it as a workplace issue. Workers (e.g. waiters/waitresses) who don't wish to inhale second-hand smoke, which is demonstrably bad for your health, shouldn't be forced to as an unavoidable consequence of their job.
|
Totally agree. It's kinda hard to do backing vocals choking on smoke so thick that you can't see the bar except for the neon signs.
The city I live in banned smoking almost 3 years ago. At the time the smoking lobby issued threats that the majority of bars would close, etc,..but something interesting happened. The 75% of people who don't smoke started going back to the bars which now has more people in them than before.
Most people I know who smoke, and that's not many, have either quit smoking, are thinking of quitting or have seriously cut down on their habit. And it is so funny also, one person I know who recently quit smoking cited societal pressures to finally quit because he felt like a loser standing outside of a bar alone with a smoke in his hand while the people inside occasionally looked at him freezing his ass off,...for a smoke.
Also to the bars I frequent, people stay longer and return more frequently than before. The people who do smoke have integrated nicely to going outside and apparently have little problem with it now. I 've got nothing against smokers, I smoked on and off for 20 years. But for me now if the ban overturned and smoking returned, I wouldn't go to bars. And the band I play with would double our fee.
But it still has the ire of the smoking lobby. They blame sales down in bars and restaurants across the board since September as the result of the smoking ban. On restauranteur I know says the smoking ban isn't hurting him one bit. He goes on to say, what is hurting him is the NHL lockout and because of it, 43 nights a year he doesn't have a packed restaurant with people watching the game or the dinner crowd that ate before they went to the game and that doesn't include the playoffs