Impact of smoking ban on clubs

[nomadologist]

Who on here "demanded" that hard drugs be legalized? I for one never did. I may have pointed out some of the problems that have resulted from the way illegal drugs use/sale is prosecuted and law enforcement of drug bans, but I never said that drugs should be legalized because of them.

That said, I think it would be conceivable (though not totally unproblematic) to legalize marijuana, and that's about it. The rest should stay illegal, we should just change the Rockefeller drug laws.

 

[zhao]

alright that's it everyone outside for ciggy/weed break NOW!! (and here's a muscle relaxer for you HMLT)

weird that such a relatively minor issue is bring up such venom. but that's always the case innit? you keep it together through hell and high water, and end up losing it over a stain on a wine glass and stab your spouse to death with a salad fork.

coming to the last few pages of this thread late, i can clearly see that the bad energy was brought into the room by none other than, surprise surprise, Tea-Bag. with this out of nowhere antagonistic and entirely beside the point personal attack:

The idea that someone who has personally helped to fund every murderous gangster terrorist scumfuck from Bogota to Helmand thinks they can take the moral highground over poor widdle bar tenders being exposed to second-hand smoke is just an absolute fucking joke.

shame on the rest of you for letting a pot stirring loser tip your good humor and dispositions so easily.

i hate it when a conversation is brought down to the level of "scoring cheap points", by then no one is any longer open to consider anyone else's POV, and are not around to "share" ideas but to defend theirs against others (with best defense being, naturally, attacks), and the whole thing quickly becomes not only pointless, but also annoying.

so let's learn our lessons here:

1. while a certain degree is due, no one is required to be absolutely consistent from day to day. we are human, and are constantly changing. also, everyone lives with contradictions in the warped reality of this day and age, and it is unrealistic, absurd to the extreme, and fucking stupid to accuse someone of hypocrisy because they are, just as an example, both against as well as a participating member of capitalism.

2. focus on what can be learned from opposing positions and view points, rather than attempting to discredit them (often with cheap and pedantic means such as pointing out inconsistencies or even spelling) out of fear (or just simply ass-holishness).

3. ignore Teabag.

 

[zhao]

Meatheads listening to dubstep! I was shocked enough when they started jumping on the emo bandwagon in this country!

i'm not shocked at all. a particular breed of dubstep (which alarmingly, and predictably, is kind of taking over the scene) is the PERFECT music for clueless meatheads and fraternity date-rapists.

(by the way, in case it is still unclear to anyone, this was what i was railing against last week with the anti-dubstep rant, not good stuff like blackdown or kode-9)

As for smoking before... the good high is like the first 30 min... If you smoke before you go out, you'll spend at least 10 min looking for your keys and mittens, 10 to the train/bus, 20 to get to the venue, and if you've built up a healthy tolerance over the past several years as I have, you've got naught but a lil haze once you make it to the club.

so true. nothing like passing a spliff around in front of a mssive stack of speakers! boom!

 

[nomadologist]

weird that such a relatively minor issue is bring up such venom. but that's always the case innit? you keep it together through hell and high water, and end up losing it over a stain on a wine glass and stab your spouse to death with a salad fork.

Weirder still that I actually completely agree with the Zizek quote in question and was actually trying to see if I was understanding HMLT's points, since they seemed so uncharacteristic. Yes, I was a little put off by the righteous indignation that seemed to inflect his posts that were anti-smoking ban, because coming from someone who had been ragging on me for simply talking about my own enjoyment of the pleasure I get from doing drugs it rang a little false.

At the moment I feel I'm unclear as to what he was actually saying, based on the vehemence of his reaction. For me, I can take cigarettes or leave them--I actually just bought a pack tonight while I was at a bar, but that's the first time I've smoked in weeks and maybe more than a month. I've just never had an issue with addiction to smoking, luckily (god only knows how I escaped this one!).

So my own position on smoking litigation is basically like this: I recognize that there is serious self-interest involved politically on the part of both the tobacco lobby and anti-tobacco lobby, which renders all litigation unethical in my opinion, or at very least based on the "bottom line" and not some delusion about people who take money from Philip Morris' competitors caring about my great-uncle's lung cancer. So I can understand why people who don't smoke will probably side with the anti-tobacco lobby, and be able to furnish good "ethically sound" reasons why, while the opposing side will be able to do the same. The sole difference between the anti- and pro-smoking positions is that, in the end, smoking addiction is far more likely to cause cancer than just about any other non-essential human activity. For this reason, it does seem important that people be given choices about whether they want to be surrounded by smoke in a non-ventilated area.

At the same time, weirdly neurotic reactionary attitudes where people act like half a whiff of second-hand smoke from 10 miles away is going to rot their lungs out is completely absurd. The "entitlement" these types seem to feel is really hilarious, and so middle class. My dad and his father before him both have chemically-induced asthma from working around zinc and zinc refining equipment for decades (my grandfather as a mining foreman, my father as an inorganic chemist in the lab), and neither of them have anyone rushing to their aid to get their former workplaces safe. The only recourse my grandfather had was legal in the form of a cash settlement, and I believe he deserved every last penny of it.

 

[nomadologist]

Have a huge problem with the idea of entitlement to pleasure, though, for obvious reasons: no one is fighting so I have the right to enjoy my drug of choice, no matter what the health consequences. Nor should they.

 

[Mr. Tea]

'I don't but I do!'

Clueless, schizophrenic fucking clown per se.

As difficult as this may be for you to comprehend, I am not numerically identical to my girlfriend. I'm glad of the ban for her sake, and I can see some benefits to it, but on the whole I oppose it. There's no contradiction here, but don't let that get in the way of a good ol' Porridge-strop, eh?

 

[Mr. Tea]

Zhao, what I said was not 'out of nowhere' at all, it was a specific response to nomad's accusation that I value my right to smoke (which is rather odd, considering that I DON'T smoke, beyond a very occasional cigarette now and then - I certainly wouldn't miss it if I never had one again) more than the health of a bartender (who just happens to be hard-working single mother, for added moral-high-ground points).

My prefered situation would be the introduction of smoke-free bars and clubs while others would remain smoking bars: then punters can drink where they like, and bar staff can work where they like, and everyone's happy.

90% of bartenders I've ever met smoke anyway, and as dominic mentions, you can't very well expect every job to have zero risk associated with it, that would be ludicrous.

 

[noel emits]

I think the ban in the UK is poorly thought out and way too inflexible. Another example of idiotic government meddling to be sure.

Having said that I do think it's a bit of a self-justifying addicts mentality that can't admit that for many people who don't smoke it is actually unpleasant to be around. It pollutes the medium we all live in - it's hard not to experience that as an intrusion if you don't want it.

Also as many will know, for those trying to break this particularly harmful and expensive dependency on a product manufactured by jumbo corporations - it is harder to quit when being constantly exposed to smoke.

If you like doing it that's fine - but you have to see how sometimes your pleasure is someone else's discomfort.

 

[Gavin]

i'm not shocked at all. a particular breed of dubstep (which alarmingly, and predictably, is kind of taking over the scene) is the PERFECT music for clueless meatheads and fraternity date-rapists.

So a dubstep remix of Sublime could be the breakout hit the genre's been waiting for? Dissensians, get on it before someone else does!

 

[hundredmillionlifetimes]

Umm. I never defended drugs--if you'll go back to the original discussion Zhao and I had, it was HE who favored the legalization of drugs (in particular heroin). I said that I thought some drugs might be ok to legalize (in my mind, marijuana) but that the ban on hard drugs and especially heroin should be maintained and strictly enforced.

So ... as a dealer (but not 'currently') and hard drug-user, 'never-defended-drugs' you ... desire to be arrested, criminalized, and dispatched to the ever-expanding prison-industrial complex? Or does such strict (ie violently implemented) enforcement only apply to everyone else? Or does the 'attraction', the enjoyment, ultimately reside in the act of transgressing the law itself (the non-existent Big Other, remember?).

So you support state-sanctioned brutality being inflicted on hard drug users, not to mention dealers, including yourself?

Or is all this not at all confusing?

If you're not saying that it's ok to smoke, then what are you saying? This is what it sounded like you were saying.

No. To repeat yet again, I said that the ban on smoking [as with harder drugs] has nothing to do with any consistent social policy for reducing the wider incidence of smoking, it is superfluous, self-defeating and repressive. The result of the ban will be, among other irrational effects, an increase in smoking consumption, as has already happened elsewhere. Yet, in spite of this being well known, despite this being the predictable consequence of a ban, the ban is supported and implemented nevertheless ['The Evil Other,' remember?]..

What does that tell us? That this fundamentally myopic, anti-social ban has nothing to do with 'concern' for the collective health [medical, social, economic] of the wider society, but everything to do with power and ideology.

In this light, people's 'personal opinions' and 'personal anecdotes', as unreliable and inconsistent as the weather, are largely irrelevant both as a guide to their actual behaviour and to the impersonal social forces at work here.

 

[zhao]

So a dubstep remix of Sublime could be the breakout hit the genre's been waiting for? Dissensians, get on it before someone else does!

shudder to think huh? but even scarier that i honestly don't think it's that far off. can't you see a generic and non descript Nu-Metal and Half-Step cross-breed taking over the linkin Park/ Limp Bizkit contingency in a few years?

when burial said in that interview how some track he likes "stares out at you with cold, soul-less shark eyes"... i don't think he fully comprehends the vision of what he's talking about. it is antithesis to what makes his music good. i think he, and people like him, will be be completely disillusioned when this ideal actually takes over, and millions of people like this:

start bumping the afore mentioned nu-metal/dubstep from their jeeps.

 

[mistersloane]

The result of the ban will be, among other irrational effects, an increase in smoking consumption, as has already happened elsewhere.

Can you point to any research on this? I wasn't aware that this was the case, it hasn't been pointed out in any of the BMJ or New Scientist articles I've been reading about it, but maybe I missed some things.

 

[noel emits]

I did read somewhere (bbc news site I think) that cigarette sales had gone up in Scotland after teh ban.

 

[mistersloane]

I did read somewhere (bbc news site I think) that cigarette sales had gone up in Scotland after teh ban.

Found that article, Scotland and Ireland...
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/newspapers/sunday_times/scotland/article601421.ece

it seems to be the only one that says it though, has anyone got any figures for the rest of the countries that have implemented a ban?

 

[noel emits]

Found that article, Scotland and Ireland...
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/newspapers/sunday_times/scotland/article601421.ece

it seems to be the only one that says it though, has anyone got any figures for the rest of the countries that have implemented a ban?

I guess the Scots and the Irish are so beside themselves at not being able to smoke in pubs that they've decided it's just not worth going on.

 

[Gavin]

Ritualized transgression has to be a part of this, yes? I'm actually very curious about this mechanism; I think it explains a lot of crime and other "destructive" and "irrational" behavior.

 

[matt b]

re: mention upthread; i went to a reggae night in nottm (at the social) a couple of months ago and for the first time in my experience dry ice was constantly being pumped out all evening, simply, from my observations to allow spliff smoking to go unnoticed.

i've not been to a 'proper' reggae dance since the ban but i doubt sounds have invested in such technology (yet), although there's mention about of some venues ignoring the ban altogether.

all in favour of the smoking ban (and i am a smoker, mainly because i have no will power), but it's somewhat strange how it has all but stopped illegal weed smoking by the by and it doesn't seem that it's improved the hype of the dance one bit.

 

[mistersloane]

Ritualized transgression has to be a part of this, yes? I'm actually very curious about this mechanism; I think it explains a lot of crime and other "destructive" and "irrational" behavior.

Heh that's an interesting one, a Bataille type of sacrifice of the self (smoke oneself to death) in order to ritually counteract the imposed taboos of society. I think it's more likely that the Celts just hate authority so much that people took to smoking more just after the ban. I doubt it carried on, but would love to see the figures.

I'm not sure it explains crime, but it's a lovely idea that it would.

 

[wheninrome]

Can you point to any research on this? I wasn't aware that this was the case, it hasn't been pointed out in any of the BMJ or New Scientist articles I've been reading about it, but maybe I missed some things.

AFAIK smoking has decreased in Ireland since the ban, but there are contradictory reports.

...despite the this early uncertainty, the ban has been a huge success. Cigarettes sales have fallen by as much as 60% in Pubs; with the countries biggest tobacco brand, Gallaher reporting an overall drop in sales of 7.5%.

The Taoiseach Bertie Ahern announced earlier this month that over 7,000 had given up smoking in the past twelve months. A survey by the Irish Department of Health showed 82% supported the ban. Anti-smoking lobby groups such as ASH had been calling for a ban for many years prior to the Governments initiative.

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Ireland's_smoking_ban_a_success_after_first_year

One-fifth of Irish smokers are lighting up less at home since the smoking ban was introduced in 2004, survey results suggest.

People taking part in the poll were asked: 'Has the smoking ban in public places affected the rules about smoking in the home?'
A total of 22% said they had reduced the amount they smoked at home since the legislation was brought in.

6% reported smoking more at home after the ban, and 71% said their behaviour had not changed.

http://www.rte.ie/news/2007/0620/smoking.html

Nearly half of Irish smokers say the ban has made them more likely to quit, according to the Tobacco Control article. Among Irish smokers who have quit, 80% said the law helped them give up smoking, and 88% say the ban helped them remain smoke-free.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2005-10-17-ireland-smoke_x.htm

One report stated that cigarette sales in Ireland and Scotland increased after a smoking ban.[44] In contrast, another report states that in Ireland, cigarette sales fell by 16 per cent in the six months after the ban's introduction.[45]In the UK as a whole, cigarette sales fell by 11% during July 2007, the first month of the smoking ban in England, compared with July 2006.[46]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoking_ban#Smoking_bans_by_country

 

[nomadologist]

So ... as a dealer (but not 'currently') and hard drug-user, 'never-defended-drugs' you ... desire to be arrested, criminalized, and dispatched to the ever-expanding prison-industrial complex? Or does such strict (ie violently implemented) enforcement only apply to everyone else? Or does the 'attraction', the enjoyment, ultimately reside in the act of transgressing the law itself (the non-existent Big Other, remember?).

So you support state-sanctioned brutality being inflicted on hard drug users, not to mention dealers, including yourself?

Or is all this not at all confusing?

No, not at all. i do not support state-sanctioned brutality on hard drug users, but I do think if you steal cars or beat people up/kill them to steal their ipods/money, you should get some kind of punishment.

And don't cry for junkies or drug dealers who need to go to jail. My friends used to make up bogus assault charges on other friends because a dimebag would go for $40 or $50 in holding. They'd call and drop the charges as soon as the drugs were all sold.

All of this is only showing your own ignorance about drug addiction and the law. The undercovers on South 3rd used to know me by name, they didn't give a fucking shit. It's only the brown ones who get in trouble