Disconsolate Spanish smokers driven out into blizzard Glum Spanish smokers have resigned themselves to the idea that the taking of tobacco will in future be done on the street, as a ban on smoking in public places came into force on 2 January. Initial reaction to the clampdown was predictable enough, with one customer of my local bar declaring on Sunday morning the government …
...I agree. I really do think the smoking bans are a terrible infringement on people's liberty, but I appreciate the fact that my clothes don't stink of smoke after a night out! I feel all confused when I go to my second home in the Czech Republic and enjoy proper pubs where people are enjoying a fag with their drink, but get cross about the fact my eyes sting and my clothes need washing more often!
Working for a UK company owned by a larger spanish business, it was delightful to see them build an £8000 temporary smoking shelter for the spanish CEO to use. (so that they didnt have to use the already permanant one the workers use). That's £8000 for about 2 hours worth of visit time (of which about 20 minutes was spent smoking). To crown it all, the guy didn't want to even use the shelter and suggested we turn off the smoke alarms in the main building instead. He was not amused when he was uncerimoniously pointed to the door and told to use his private smoking folly.
At least they get nice weather to smoke in!
I've no sympathy for smokers. Having just returned from a trip abroad where I experienced smokers in bars and clubs for the first time since the UK ban came in, I can barely understand how I decided a social life was worth it before the ban. I suffer from reduced lung capacity thanks to a long bout of mis-diagnosed TB, and I find the effects of third hand ciggy smoke particularly difficult. Add in the stench on your clothes and hair after a night out drinking or clubbing, and I can't even work out how the smokers themselves out up with it.
"but what exactly has this got to do with the Reg? It's not sci or tech really, is it?"
As a matter of fact it used to be the case that smoking was banned in any ADPU/later IT environment because smoke, along with dust and other airborne substances, interferences with the efficiency and longevity of hot chips.
You'd be surprised. Most of central Spain is well above sea level, Madrid is 650m and looking out my office window towards Avila I can see a snow capped mountain range. There are plains over 1Km above sea level, not just peaks and it is possible to join the mile high club without leaving terra firma. It's also the only country I've lived in that I've needed to use snow chains even though it's the most southern.
up its fu*king arse
no, you can shove your foul smelling, cancer causing piece of crap up your ass.
Roll on the day all smoking is banned everywhere non smokers are, or likely to be. I know i am going to be flamed by the 'we work an hour less than you because we are addicted to drugs' brigade, but 1) i dont care, and 2) i still dont care.
smelly asshats, before you whine that the government taking away your right to smoke would effect your human rights and freedoms, i like to shoot and hunt foxes, so dont give me that crap either.I have the right not to die form your radioactive smoke.
Was going to use a troll, but i am not trolling, that is my opinion.
Coz if you do you can p*ss right off, the emissions from cars are far more likely to get you than second hand smoke when you're outside.
I'm a smoker and I support the ban as it really isn't right for us to inflict second hand smoke on the rest of you but when idiots come out with this ban-it-everywhere BS I can't help but laugh.
I loved going to Spain and being able to light up in a pub, ah well Crete next summer instead I suppose.
Also you anti-smoking-tards who already posted, I just have to ask, do any of you drive or make use of emission producing transport..? You probably do, and that probably makes you fucking hypocrites doesn't it?
You could use an electric vehicle couldn't you or ride a bike even for the vast majority of journeys or hell even do what i do and walk.
But no, most people are prepared to pay the price of chucking a few pollutants into the atmosphere for the sake of convenience. Which is fair enough I say, just don't gripe at me for wanting to do the same thing. So yes, yes you are all hypocrites unless of course 100% of all your journeys are 100% necessary and you never travel for pleasure.
Well you see, I am not unreasonable and that is fine. However, I don't get why I can't go smoke in a smoking area away from staff and other non smokers instead of having to go freeze my tits off and throw my cig ends in the street.
Also, I don't think it matters much where your drive your car because air pollution is one of those things that affects everybody when they are outside and is one of the reasons I don't buy any of this secondary smoke research because how exactly do you separate all of those smoking nasties from the car nasties you inhale when you're outside?
I realise that when we have the age of the electric car this argument will be invalidated but the only point I am making is that the majority of high and mighty anti-smokers don't give a damn about anybody elses health or whatever when it comes to their own convenience.
There is a middle ground here but as usual our society just ignores that and flys right off the deep end.
Therefore I hope those who I am replying to enjoy the haze of fag smoke at the door of every boozer as they enter. Choke on it you bastards! and I hope it stinks ya clothes out too, any excuse to make you wash that damn shirt which apparently some people will wear the next day provided it doesn't smell of smoke.
As a truck driver 100% of journeys are necessary, some of which include delivering your cigarettes so not only do you pollute once you also make others do it.
So no, he is not a hypocrite, but you are, twice over; once for smoking and once for moaning about tranport (unless you chuffing walk to the tobacco field and pick your own leaves and then walk to a forest and fell your own trees for papers and cellulose for filters).
So you are saying that truck full of Benson and hedges being delivered is 100% necessary?
Seems at odds with what one of the other commenter's said.
Anyway, I already posted a reply to this line but basically yes ok I won't inhale (much) car fumes inside but I will outside and as I already said I am ok with that. I will go on inhaling all of your '100% necessary' transport outside if you just quit whinging whenever I light up a fag ok?
Stop talking crap man, I don't smoke to deliberately posion you and now we have to go outside I can't do that even if I wanted to. However when you get in the car you're poisioning everyone you drive past and what makes you worse than me is that you won't accept resonsiblity, instead calling it a secondary effect...what you drive by the way, the most efficent car on the market or a gas-guzzling status symbol?
"Stop talking crap man, I don't smoke to deliberately posion you and now we have to go outside I can't do that even if I wanted to."
Well that's appropriate then! You can sit outside with the other polluters, and breathe each others muck in! I hope you enjoy both the smells and the company, and that you will never whine about the attitude of non smokers to the smell of your product as you breathe in purest, cool as a mountain stream, diesel.
"Also you anti-smoking-tards who already posted, I just have to ask, do any of you drive or make use of emission producing transport..? You probably do, and that probably makes you fucking hypocrites doesn't it?"
Tell you what, I'll make a perfectly reasonable deal with you: If you don't smoke in indoor public places, such as pubs, bars, restaurants, etc, I won't drive in those places. Sound fair? Good. Sorted.
You can still enjoy a coffee and fag here, at any time of the day or night. Except in restaurants and public places and bars who choose not to allow it. And thats how it ought to be. And i'm a smoker.
Whats wrong with everybody? What happened to common sense? This blanket ban of smoking is complete madness.
Alcohol kills many more people than smoking ever did and non drinkers naively turn a blind eye because they think it has no direct effect on them.
What if alcohol were to be subjected to the same draconian laws and prohibition were introduced? Where would that take us?
Utter nonsense.
Using 2008/2009 stats.
http://www.fph.org.uk/eighteen_per_cent_of_all_adult_deaths_caused_by_smoking,_finds_report
http://www.drinkdriving.org/drink_driving_statistics_uk.php
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8485122.stm
So alcohol related deaths are 9000, drink driving are around 800
Smoking... 81,400 estimated. Now I accept, estimates can be a bit high, but 9x higher than alcohol is pushing it.
This next source will of course be debatable due to the harder nature to confirm, but passive smoking alone seems to beat all alcohol (self induced and drunk driving) deaths. http://www.patient.co.uk/health/Smoking-and-Others-(Passive-Smoking).htm at over 10,000
You are exactly the kind of customer that pubs don't want!
Don't go to a fucking pub then. They are full of beer swilling nicotine addicts and real community melting pots. Or at least they used to be until all you lot stuck your noses in the air and hijacked the politicians.
Whats next for you dickheads? Complete isolation for anyone with a cold?
"What happened to common sense? This blanket ban of smoking is complete madness."
The UK pub/bar industry was given the opportunity to avoid compulsory bans, all they had to do was get a fairly moderate proportion of drinking area smoke free and clearly sign the areas. After 5 years they had managed to put smoking allowed signs up in over 90% of bars but provide bugger all smoke free service.
They played chicken with the government and lost. That's why compulsion is necessary, no-one in the trade wants to jump first and by and large none of them want to jump at all.
So far I've seen vanishingly small genuine complaint from smokers about our ban, because even smokers appreciate not drowning in a fug of smoke. Right at the start we saw a telling incident: builders having a lunchtime drink physically picking up the one just preparing to light up and throwing him out of the bar.
I was in Kaprun in November and really didnt like the smoke filled bars, as a result we actually drank less out and spent less money as a result.
I was shocked at just how much difference the smoking ban has made, in my youth it was accepted that you would come home smelling of smoke.
Its a shame, the skiing was great but I wouldnt go back for the nightlife.
I'm ok with the reasoning that hostelry workers health should protected so they are not exposed to the fumes but I don't see why bars/restaurants can't set up a separate area -properly isolated and ventilated- where smokers can enjoy a drink. Shouldn't be a problem as long as it's not staffed. I think this has been the approach on some other European countries. This law seems to me as yet another attack on personal liberties by nanny state.
No point implementing a ban around playgrounds. They are in the open air. Smoke from smokers is a tiny proportion of all other particulates in the air, mostly caused by vehicle emmisions etc. However all these particulates are in very small quantities and any smoke from smokers will rapidly disperse to such minute amounts as to be not worth measuring. If there is a ban around playgrounds will they take into account wind direction or implement a 100m perimeter boundary - just to be safe. Either way it just shows that rather than take scientific evidence into account they are implementing draconion rules just because they "think" it's the right thing to do because goverment knows better than anyone.
(I am a smoker, and have no problem with the UK state of affairs)
back in 2007 when the UK ban was introduced, I did some back of the envelope calculations, and worked out that UK.gov will be at least £5 billion a year worse of as a *direct* result of the smoking ban. I couldn't size indirect costs, but they will grow, as more people become longer-living ex-smokers, and start to cost the NHS, rather than subsidize it.
Now £5billion/year is a helluva hit to take over a few years. For example, over 3 years, it's a shortfall of £15 billion.
When the people who had been crowing over the ban saw my figures, and agreed with the logic, they started to realise that in order to have the smoking ban, EVERYBODY will have to pay more tax.
Simples.
It's almost uncanny that the VAT rise announced today is expected to pull in £13billion in the first year ......
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