Roll on 1 July 2007

It is indeed great news. I'll be able to go to gigs again! Huzzar!

Stephen

James
I'm right with you on this one. Hip hip and indeed hip hooray. We were at a small local Italian restaurant earlier in the week and one smoker nearby ensured that everything we were wearing had to go straight into the laundry bin as soon as we got home.

There are some great pubs here in Brighton that I cannot currently enter due to the blue smoke hitting me in the back of the throat from 100 yards away. I suspect that it'll take time for the stench to subside and the sticky yellow cancer to finally gravitate in rivulets down the walls to the skirting boards, but eventually we'll get there.
Yeah, I can't wait either. I've been waiting for this day for a very long time. The Plough in Swindon (Croft Road) won't know what's hit it (think 1950's back street boozer). They'll probably use Ashtray scented Glade air un-freshener just to feel normal.

Chaps

And about time to.

For 57 years I have had to tolerate these selfish sods stinking everywhere out and the quicker fags are consigned to history the better.

Regards

Mick

Worse of course than bus and taxi fumes, and even the side effects of mass air travel? [Smiley].

Fredrik

Fredrik

If you spend 10 minutes in a room with just one smoker, your clothes stink like a stale old ash tray.

Smoking is a dirty disgusting habit.

It is on its way out so the discussion is all but academic.

Regards

Mick

Where I am going it not on the way out! Just one more reason to escape the pathetic UK Nanny State! There is law law for everything, and no possibility of taking responsibility, or not, here anymore.

I see your point of course, but I believe in "live and let live." In my view it should be a question addressed by landlords, who if it was economically sane would soon have banned smoking in their premisses.

Kindest regards from Fredrik

Fredrik

The banning of smoking is spreading worldwide.

There is an argument for live and let live but there is no defence for one person stinking out a room and making everyone elses clothes smell of stale tobacco.

Regards

Mick

quote:

"live and let live."

Not when it harms others Fredrik. That is "Live and don't care about the impact on others". If smoking didn't affect everyone else, I'd agree with you.

As for the economics, many people go to pubs in Ireland that previously couldn't stand the smoke.

Regards,

Steve

Dear Mick,

Really I don't much enjoy pubs, not least because of the increasingly unsavoury behavior that is apparent. I am quite content to smoke at home and let my friends decide if this is an insumountable obstacle to a continuing friendship. Amazing as it may sound, I have found that more than a few less brave souls than me are glad to fire up in relaxed and unjudegental company! I could smoke on the train where I am going should I so wish! I shall naturally do so, though in an empty part with the window open. "Vive la difference," I say! No it is not France!

Kindest regards from and unrecinstructed old devil! [Unreconstructable Smiley]! Fredrik

Dear Steve,

I am sure you have looked at what I wrote for Mick just above. But if we take the premise that nothing we do should ever inflict a potential harm on others, however negligable, then civil aviation should stop tomorrow. Do you agree about that?

Kindest regards from Fredrik

It's already up here in Scotland and it's great !

It's nice going into a restaurant and ALL tables are "non-smoking".

It's nice going out and returning home without smelling like an ashtray.

It's nice not being passively killed.

It's nice seeing a dining table without an ashtray.

Now the interesting bit. Cigarette sales in off-licences have increased as a result.

As a general point, presumably it's a 'Nanny State' when someone else wants to stop them from doing something harmful?

That what they are doing is harmful to other people as well seems to be a point almost completely ignored by smokers.

I am sorry to rant, but my own chest health throughout my life has been adversely affected by growing up in a heavily smoking household. And at 42 I am angry about the negative health legacy inflicted on me, over which I had absolutely no choice.

I am all for freedom of choice, but as I said right at the beginning, smokers (the minority of the British public), in order to smoke at a pub, will now have to do what I currently have to do in order to avoid the smoke at a pub - i.e. go outside. Smokers, welcome to the world as it has been for the rest of us!!

If you smoke you stink. If you smoke you are also stupid. If you smoke in public you are also pig ignorant and selfish and you make us non-smokers stink too. You pollute yourself and you pollute those around you. The only female I have been out with who smoked I married. I married her on the promise that once married she would quit. She didnt quit so I divorced her. I think this is fair.

I think this filthy disgusting offensive habit should be outlawed and offenders shot. Lest anyone think me extreme I do of course advocate warning them first. I think this is fair.

Anyone who sells tobacco is a drug dealer. All dealers should be shot and their businesses and personal assets sold by the state and used to fund medical research and tree planting. I think this is fair.

If any offenders escape abroad (especially Poland)they should be tracked down and shot. Foreign countries who allow smoking should be invaded. No exceptions. Mo mercy. I think this is fair.

We have the smokers on the run now chaps and it's time to implement the next phase of Operation We Dont Want Your Filthy Stench Anymore. Faint heart never won fair land.

On a looser here by the look of it! [Smiley]! Fredrik

Just think boys now that smoking is out of the way we can tackle the other serious problem affecting society DRINK. This has now become the NHS's biggest problem and the cries for doing something about it have started. So watch out Nanny is coming after you.

quote:

Originally posted by long-time-dead:
It's already up here in Scotland and it's great !

It's nice going into a restaurant and ALL tables are "non-smoking".

It's nice going out and returning home without smelling like an ashtray.

It's nice not being passively killed.

It's nice seeing a dining table without an ashtray.

Now the interesting bit. Cigarette sales in off-licences have increased as a result.

Just saw this point and of course we are now more liable to help kids die faster because we have driven smokers back into their own homes. Possibly make them want to smoke more (wife jokes and all that). Funny how teenage smoking has risen and not decreased year on year.

We certainly may have cured one problem possibly only to create another for the future. Just shows how far sighted a society we are.

By the way I am a non smoker who came from a heavy smoking household.

As a fan of cigars I'm hardly what you'd call a real smoker... I indulge in this little vice maybe five or six times a year.

I'm already in negotiations with one particular landlord for a "last hurrah" of tobacco excess on June 30th 2007 in his small, specialised establishment.

He smokes, his staff smoke, and well over 90% of his clientele smoke.
The following day his pub will be smoke free too. So we're going to plan a pipes & cigars night and thoroughly enjoy the last time we can do this.

As for the non-smokers?

Well, the event will be diarised, posters put up and folk made aware. No-one HAS to come and get themselves polluted by all us dirty disgusting smokers, do they?

I'm probably not going to be too popular amongst the other posters on this thread, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if things like this go on all over the country that night.

They banned smoking in workplaces in NZ about a year ago - so of course that included pubs and so forth. The first time I went to a pub after the ban I couldn't believe what a difference it made. My clothes didn't smell and I felt better when I got home.

As a matter of interest, the workplace smoking ban meant that the police were pulling over people smoking in vehicles that were obvious business vehicles.

quote:

Originally posted by ewemon:
Just saw this point and of course we are now more liable to help kids die faster because we have driven smokers back into their own homes.

Don't get your point.

My children experience no smoke at home, no smoke on public transport, no smoke in shops, no smoke in restaurants, cinemas etc.

That can only be a good thing.

Any smoker who decides to pollute the lungs of their children have only got themselves to blame - nobody else. They are actively killing their children passively.

My children are safer.

quote:

Originally posted by Mike1380:

....As for the non-smokers?

Well, the event will be diarised, posters put up and folk made aware. No-one HAS to come and get themselves polluted by all us dirty disgusting smokers, do they?

Mike I shall be making a particular point of not visiting a/the pub that night (though course being mid-summer, I could sit outside...).

But as for the more general implication in your comment, "No-one HAS to come and get themselves polluted by all us dirty disgusting smokers, do they?"

That's the point. At the moment the only option a non-smoker has in order to avoid smoke at a pub (etc) is to NOT go, or sit outside in all weathers.

To smoke, after 01.07.07 you will simply have the same option that the non-smoking majority of the population has today.

My 'clean' air does not endanger your health (cue clever, clever comments about micro-pollutants...). Your smokey air does mine.

Other contributors comments about teenage smoking (especially girls, I fear - and there is some evidence that it's to keep the baby stunted for an easier teenage birth) and drinking should indeed give the nation cause for concern.

I think the key difference, and why the analogy breaks down, is that (apart from the direct anti-social fallout from pissed-up people) there isn't "passive drinking" in the same way that there is "passive smoking".

And it is this passivity element that is the main reason behind the ban, not the nannying elimination of individual people's choice to smoke.

People may still choose to smoke if they wish, but they won't be able to inflict it on the rest of us in the same way.

And I am not sure anyone is pretending it will wipe out smoking per se overnight, but over time as it becomes publicly less seen/acceptable, smoking will reduce. (As will the taxes from tobacco, but then we won't need as much to spend on smoking-related healthcare.)

We do need better education on alcohol excess.

James

Chaps

Smoking is becoming less acceptable as the years roll by. It is indulged in mainly by those in the lower social economic classes who then bleat how skint they are. If they are daft enough to spend £5 on a packet of 20, then they are too dim to care about.

I am not interested in their views but I am pleased that the last suit I bought no longer stinks of their smoke.

Regards

Mick

quote:

Originally posted by Mick Parry:
It is indulged in mainly by those in the lower social economic classes

Mick

Really, I didn't know that! In New Zealand we have several Members of Parliament who are smokers (but never on television). I have no idea who makes up the main group of smokers in this country and what "class" they come from.

Where do you get such information about smokers in your country?

Deane

While I am glad that smoking in pubs will stop, however I have got round the problems of smoky pubs by jut not going to them a long time ago - so that now I am used to not going to pubs. Will I start visiting pubs after the ban - probably not.

However there might be a bigger long term backlash that will impact us all in that smokers do in fact do the population of the country a service, they contribute a greater amount of taxes, they tend to not claim old age pension as long or at all, and their medical costs are less than the taxes they pay and the pensions they do not claim. Oh and they persuade non smokers to not go to pubs, so saving the non smoker from buying drinks at high prices.

The non smoker will have to pay for the loss of revenue and increased cost, unless the smoker can be persuaded to continue smoking in private - time to set up nicotine dens I think.

Deane

I agree that there are no official statstics to fall back on but just looking around backs up what I say.

I am currently working for an organisation that employs a lot of low paid admin staff and a lot of highly paid technical / commercial staff in equal numbers.

The outside smoking hut is exclusively filled up with the low paid workers, the higher paid tend to spend their money on flash cars. I have lost count of the amount of Porsches here.

My club attracts the above average salary type of chap and hardly any of them smoke, again they tend to pump their money into big boys toys and exotic holidays.

The semi retired Brits I meet in Spain hardly ever smoke and some of these people have half a dozen houses in Europe.

Basically smoking is for mugs.

To answer Dereks point, the low paid will continue to smoke, they will die young and continue to subsidise my pension etc. Absolute mugs.

Regards

Mick