Smoking

[wellinghall]

[Poll #1334926]

Comments

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

In an effort to make my position slightly clearer: I have no objection to people doing whatever they want in the privacy of their own homes. But I don't see why smoking in public places (particularly in crowded public places) is any better than walking around punching people - both involve knowingly doing harm to those around you for your own pleasure. That's acceptable (IMO) if and only if the other people have consented to it (and there is a case for special smoking-allowed pubs on those grounds).

[gramarye1971]

As someone who watched all four grandparents die painful and occasionally prolonged deaths from smoking-related causes -- heart attack, lung/liver cancer, and two cases of emphysema -- this is my view as well.

[rustica.livejournal.com]

I disagree with you only on the issue of smoking-allowed pubs, and that is because of the workers in them. We've spent so long making sure that people can't be hired or fired on the grounds of sex, inclination, race, etc, but to require people to either be smokers in order to be employed, or to put themselves at risk for someone else's habit is just utterly abhorrent to me. It opens the door to a return to so many other discriminatory practices.
/rant

I totally agree with you about smoking in public places, btw, except perhaps if they were adequately fenced off from non-smoking areas.

(Though I remember seeing some people smoking something that released a lot of very blue smoke while they were sitting in a very smelly wild garlic patch in a Newcastle park. I must say, that showed a certain amount of initiative not usually associated with potheads!)

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

I agree that the issue of employees for smoking-allowed pubs is a problem, and that I'm not sure there's an acceptable way to solve it. So to unpack a bit: assuming that there was an acceptable solution (robot bar-staff, perhaps ;) ) then I'd be happy with them; if the employee issue can't be solved acceptably, then I'd be worried for the same reasons you are. Partly, of course, the difficulty comes with drawing the line - after all, is it fair to insist that a fencing instructor must either enjoy fencing or put themselves at (admittedly much smaller) risk for someone else's habit? After all, people do get injured sometimes. (Granted it's much more unlikely that someone who doesn't enjoy fencing would want to become a fencing instructor than that someone who doesn't smoke would get a job in a bar, but the question is, in a sense, where between those two examples you draw the line....)