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Can someone explain to me why not wanting to die of cancer from someone’s 2nd hand fag smoke is intolerant? Pubs are shutting down because they are selling beer for £3.50 a pint when you can get it in the supermarket for 99p, people won’t stand for it any more and have been voting with their feet for years.
The first part is about choice .. smoking bars, pubs, or non-smoking bars, pubs. The last bit is government spiel, you shouldn’t believe every bit of guff that’s put out through the telly. When beer was £1 a pint, you could make home brew for 5p a pint.
The bit about cancer from passive smoking is a load of bollocks. There is no evidence to support this, no evidence anywhere.
Bulwark – you seem to assume that every non-smoker is a rapid anti-smoking fascist. Like paulostermeyer, I drank in pubs for years and several of my friends (and an ex-girlfriend of 5 years) smoked and I tolerated smoking as everybody had to. Now I can go to the pub or a restaurant and not have to breathe in second-hand smoke or come home with my clothes stinking of stale cigarettes.
Nobody is stooping smokers from smoking – they are merely banned from smoking in public places, and rightly so. At the end of the day and whether you or any other smokers like it, smoking is a disgusting, stinking, anti-social habit and one which impacts on non-smokers in the ways I stated in my first paragraph, and why should it – tradition?
As regards smoking pubs and non-smoking pubs, the reality of the situation is that no landlord is going to make his pub non-smoking voluntarily while the pub across the road allows smoking – might as well make the pub for men only or whites only – it’s the kiss of death.
Dave Jay – landlords bleating about the smoking ban being the kiss of death for pubs is nothing more than spiel by the industry and a cover-up for the fact that pubs have been ripping us off for years and now people are getting sick of it and voting with their feet.
However, what really stops me going to the pub more often is the extortionate charge for non-alcoholic drinks. Being charged a couple of quid for a glass of cola is bad enough but when the drink comes from those terrible mixer systems it is an absolute disgrace when it costs the pub coppers.
Very true Paul. Wine is similar, they sell a £4 bottle of wine at £3.50 for a small glass which is quite a nice little earner. I know in the past however that some landlords / tenants are obliged to buy wines and spirits from certain places when they know they can get the same product cheaper elsewhere. Same goes with the beer they can offer. A landlord I know buys his one of his bitters at around £1.50 a pint and sells it at £2.75, yet he says he couldn’t make it pay without the profit he makes from the meals he offers. Maybe if the rent was cheaper the beer would be cheaper, Weatherspoons seem to manage it somehow but someone said they can do it cheap because they buy beer which is close to its use by date, how true that is I don’t know.
What I would like to know is , how can a brewer sell a draught beer at £1.50 to a pub, yet sell it at considerably less to a supermarket in a can or bottle. With certain offers at a supermarket you can buy well known beers at £1.25 a litre yet they are selling it to pubs at £1.50 a pint. You would think with the state of pubs at present that breweries would take the initiative and either drop their prices to pubs or let landlords get their alcohol from wherever they want. It could be of course the long term plan is just to cater for the home drinker.
Going slightly off topic but in my experience the most anti smoking people are the ones who used to smoke and quite understandably they want to get there message across. This however sometimes comes across as preaching which not just with smoking but with taking drugs, religion, drinking, gambling, etc etc etc rubs people up the wrong way. Sure people need to know the facts but they also need to be able to make their own choice without being unduly pressurised even if that means by experiencing it first. We could make a very long list of things that individuals do that affect the lives of others from smokers, drug takers, drinkers, clergy, politicians etc . The human race has found many many ways of getting rid of its own species and will continue to do so for ever and a day because as this thread is evident we don’t tend to agree on much. Firefox, I’m very sorry to hear of your family experiences and yes the tobacco firms have to take a portion of the blame but it shouldn’t really take much intelligence to see that inhaling smoke is not good for you. I’m not a smoker myself and never have been save the odd cigar when younger when generally p1ssed after winning a darts league or knockout because I never really saw the attraction. I think the teenage years are the times when people are caught because of peer pressure etc as I can’t imagine too many forty year olds if presented with a cigarette for the first time would see the point of smoking it. As a previous poster has said there is no certain evidence with regard to passive smoking , as it happens I would disagree whether it be cigarette, exhaust or otherwise, but then you could ask Mr Blair who needs certain evidence to put others lives at risk. (From pubs to the Iraq war in two easy steps, not bad eh ? If you give me a minute I’ll find some way to link how overrated Exotic Dancer is!
)Firefox, people need to decide for themselves as you did but can I ask what might you have said if you were confronted with an anti smoking colleaugue a year before you gave up ?
In all this debate the smokers have not spoken about cigarettes being highly addictive and damaging to the user’s health. Would you be happy if intravenous heroine users turned up at your local and started jacking up? Cigarettes are bad for users and non-users alike. Any means by which the use of this drug is restricted should be applauded.
If I may correct that slightly Firefox. The active drug in tobacco – nicotine – causes next to no physical damage (other than its addictive potential) unlike narcotics such as heroin; it is the tars produced by burning tobacco that cause cancers/heart disease etc.
The dangers of passive smoking are as ill-researched and anecdotal as the evidence that nicotine is actually good for you due to some scanty evidence that it helps prevent Alzheimers. Both theories, as they stand, are bad, bad science. But inevitably one has been hailed to rafters as TRUE and the other hushed-up.
I was prepared to give your anti-smoking rhetoric some credance until you confessed to being a reformed smoker; the evangelising zeal of all ‘born-again’ types are best given short shrift.
Whatever happened to the tolerant libertarian?
Going off at a tangent, but devotees of fine tobacco such as I do feel that cigarettes give the gentle art of smoking a very bad name, as the Bright Virginia strain of tobacco generally used in their manufacture is particularly mild, hence it can be inhaled comfortably. Lung tissue for reasons not wholly understood is particularly susceptible to the carcinogenic affects of tobacco smoke, and like the long-term inhaling of any particulate foreign body, chronic bronchitis and emphysema are almost inevitable.
Cigar and pipe tobacco, in all its glorious variety, is much stronger and has no need to be inhaled (is unpleasant if tried) as a sufficient nicotine kick is obtained by absorption through the mouth and nasal passages. And of course the exquisite flavour and aroma produced by lazily rolling the smoke around the mouth and nose is equally rewarding.
Lung cancer was rare until the 1930s – despite cigars and pipes being smoked for 200 years – after which it rose dramatically. Sir Richard Doll, the chap commissioned to discover why lung cancer had risen so, was convinced for some time it was due to fumes from the rapidly growing miles of tarred roads being laid, and he along with many others were most surprised when it transpired to be due to no more than a simple shift in the way tobacco was smoked: cigarettes overtook pipe and cigar some thirty years previously (typical latency period needed for lung cancer to appear), very much accentuated during the Great War when fags formed part of the soldiers’ ration
I think that nicotine is one of the most addictive substances on the planet and it’s so triggered by association..it’s also pretty bad for your mouth and gums and that in itself can lead to heart disease….I’ve got a theory that, if non smokers find the smell unpleasant then ex smokers find it more so..I must say, though, that the smell of old holborne [my baccy of choice] is lovely and if anyone walks past me in the street with a pipe full of clan I am tempted to follow them a la Pied Piper……what I do miss is standing outside pubs in Ireland having conversations with complete strangers that I wouldn’t have had if we’d been sat inside smoking!
It’s quite clear from these posts that those in favour of the smoking ban for all pubs on the basis of providing choice for non smokers just don’t see anything wrong with removing all choice completely for smokers and pubs in order that they can have their choice, which they had before anyway.
The statement by davidbrady is not just true, it’s a reflection of the opinion and choice of all who frequent pubs, ie, that non smoking pubs won’t and don’t work as well as smoking pubs because smoking pubs are preferred by pub punters in general.
Two pubs in my town actually offered the choice before and had no smoking bars and seating areas in their pubs but strangely enough, even before the ban, they were empty and unused.
Yes there are always many factors affecting any business downturn but pubs would generally survive as they are a haven and fixture for the working man in times of adversity for comfort or relaxation as well as for enjoyment in general, however the smoking ban will be the final nail in the coffin for many, many pubs that may otherwise have survived the recession and it will be the end of the pub trade, culture and tradition in this country.
The fact that people who barely use them seem so fascist and fanatical in removing choice for others, maybe because non-smokers don’t like to think anyone else is enjoying themself, I find rather strange.
Now, let’s work on removing the choice of people to have cars as they give me no choice in breathing their highly poisonous fumes, then we can set about raising taxes and cutting benefits for fat people, the real drain on health and society.
The biggest reason for the downturn in bars is thus. The 20- 30 age group almost all own their own properties, these properties were are almost all overvalued when they bought them (relevant to the income in their local areas), and they were given huge mortgages to buy them and huge loans to style them as they wished, now they have huge outgoings and can’t afford having a regular social life that extends to bars, plain and simple.
I am in that age category and when I’m recruiting for a night out, 9 times out of ten the answer is "Skint", the answer is never that there is a huge selection of channels on sky (most of my mates cant afford sky). I dont have a mortgage and have pretty much no debt to my name so I can afford to go out every night of the week, but I am about the only person I know in my position.
The smoking issue is something that makes bars more uncomfortable to be in, if I am not drinking and am busy I will usually only have about one cigarette every hour or so, but when I’m drinking it’s more like about every 5 minutes, so in non smoking bars I find myself constantly waiting for people to wrap up their sentences in conversation so I can go back out and have a smoke (like if you need to go to the toilet and someone is talking to you). On the up side to the smoking ban, it does actually lead to "smirting" where you get talking to girls in the smoking area that you probably wouldnt have got round to talking to in the bars.
A lot of my friends are actually non smokers, but they are not die hard anti-smoking fascists. My brother runs the best shebeen in town, and obviously the smoking ban doesnt apply yet most people who call round are actually non smokers, but it is actually nice to be able to sit and have a drink and a cigarette and socialise in a nice environemnt without constantly having to walk outside every time I need a cigarette.
I would not promote smoking at all, I started smoking when I was tweleve because everyone else was doing it and since I was thirteen I havent been a day without a cigarette in sixteen years, despite trying patches and all sorts. Despite the fact that both of my parents smoked, when I grew up I never grew up up suffering from coughs and bronchitis like firefox allegedly has, and I expect he must be seriously unlucky to have suffered such symptoms as I dont actually know anyone else that suffered from this in similar circumstances. If I saw young people smoking these days I would discourage them from smoking as if I personally (like almost every smoker) wish I’d never started, but that doesnt mean that I want to be treated by the government like a second class citizen because I smoke. Smokers are demonized and treated like sh1t in almost evry aspect possible.
When I was in the falklands last year (which is still free smoking), the CO there was some ex SAS anti smoking nazi prick, who made the entire station antismoking, with the rule that you werent allowed to smoke within 5 metres of any buildings in the main camp, and he would send the works party around trying to catch people in breach of this rule, in which case they would be criminally charged under military law. Now what you have to bear in mind about the falklands is that the temperatures can dip to -25 and it is regularly -10 or worse with constant gale forces winds and a windchill factor that would cut you to ribbons. Now under his duty of care to troops you would expect that he might organise some sort heated smoking area sheltered from the wind, as there is in most places in the UK, but no, all we got was "tough luck". The the tosser put the price of "HM Forces duty paid cigarettes" up from 2 pound to 4 pounds per pack, in order to round up money to renovate the bar (which was non smoking), which is really just what this government have been doing but on a smaller scale. Now what you then have to bear in mind is that you are only enttled to get 50 pounds in cash per week from the station cashier to live off when you are posted in the falklands, so if you are on 20 cigarettes a day then you have 22 pounds a week to live off there. Needless to say that as soon as I returned from six months there I swiftly handed in my papers to get out altogether.
I have all the time in the world for basic non smokers (of which I can tell you are one DB and P. Ost) and always try to minimalise the presence of smoke in the company of non smokers, but I have no time whatsoever for extremist anti smoking fascists, as I have had to live closely with plenty of them and 99% of them are not just selfish and self absorbed with regards smoking but in almost every aspect of their life.
I have went to bars with low ceilings, however where there wwas a clear need for air conditioning, "Flares" in Wolverhampton is the worst one, where when you got up and had a shower the morning after being there, as soon as the water hit my hair it smelt like someone had just dunked my face in an ashtray.
it is not hard to understand why cigarette smoking in pubs in particular was regarded as extremely selfish and anti-social by a lot of people.
The constant reference to facism is interesting. You seem to be subtely defining facism as the intervention of the state to legislate against activities which it believes to be harmful to the majority of people, especially the vulnerable (e.g. children – no choice whatsoever, elderly people and women, who face ridicule and possibly violent conduct if they request somebody refrains from smoking).
by a lot of people who don’t frequent pubs on a regular basis and have no care if they disappear or not
no, you’re defining that – you seem to think that it is acceptable to remove choice of others to suit your choice – end of – who gave you the crown?
pubs and smokers go together, pubs and non-smokers don’t
Hate to repeat myself but WTF has the smoking ban got to do with pubs going downhill ?
I smoke, I drink and I do a lot of worse things that I wont repeat on here but this topic has turned into a debate of defiance against being told what you can and can’t do (one I agree with on behalf of the smokers) as opposed to why the Great British pub is anything but Great anymore.
Just to be an arsehole, I hate the fact that I can’t walk out of the pub as a sixteen yr old and fight an opposing fan on a late Saturday morning.
Now some of you will say… well I hate to think, but others will say thank god for that and I agree. I live with regret with things like that but it was England.
I am not a facist, racist or anything like but working in the capital makes me want to cry. I’m currently reading a book called Criminal which is a biography of a kid, only a couple of years older than me, who grew up in that era and when you look back at what people could do without preaching or regulation it really makes me think…
Pubs will be a distant Dickensian memory one day (as will smoking but nobody reading that will crave for the moment they "lit up a smoke").
Lee
and I’ve just read my last post and wont change a thing because it just goes to show what a **** this country brings up with it’s pub/drinking culture
pubs and non-smokers don’t
Yes they do
And as I have said earlier, we have the non-smoking ban here for almost 4 years and all of my smoking friends don’t miss the smoking in bars and restaurants at all
As a smoker, I feel the ban was the right thing to do, and have no issues observing it.
I do not feel as if my human rights have been breeched, because I am no longer able to smoke in a pub. Neither did I feel my rights were breeched when it was banned on airplanes, buses, libraries or operating theatres.
It can be a little bit nippy having to go outside the pub when it’s cold, but I’m sure it’s a lot less annoying that worrying about secondary cancer, or having your clobber reek of snout that you didn’t imbibe yourself.
When they try to ban the physical act of smoking, say, by making tobacco subject to criminal classification, then I’ll worry about my human rights. But until then, I’m comfortable with current arrangements.
Has it affected pubs?
Not in my experience it hasn’t.
Has it affected pubs?
Not in my experience it hasn’t
Just about every landlord and brewery has said it has affected trade. It can be an excuse but i would be loath to ignore that
I am not that bothered about it (as a light smoker). Would be gently against rather than strongly against
PUBS;
luvley plases. you get beer and stuff..bin to won today . .. had pints of ipa. Tahts english for INdian pale ale.
bLoody luvlee stuff you know!!!
good plase to talk about stufff and stuff. ..loev you dB.
lvoe you all espesally you janethopmiester and db.
he called me names yu no???
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