Smoking

Alcohol is next on the list, of course...

Bit earlier in Wales, it's April (Rushes off to check) and Northern Ireland and it's already banned in Scotland and the Irish Republic.

Hope not - don't think there have been any cases of passive drinking, have there :-)

Following on from gavin's message. . .

Err not much!

• Larger louts causing damage
• Fights fuelled by booze
• Deaths from drunk driving
• Misery to families through alcoholism Alcohol abuse is a major problem affecting plenty of non-abusers.

Pubs (proper pubs) should be part of the solution not part of the problem.

Bars, clubs and off-licences (ie not-pubs) appear to lack any controls whatsoever. If they need a bouncer on the door then what does that tell you about when their dangerous drunks get put out onto the street?

Yep, the larger the lout, the larger the damage.

E.

The Strawbury Duck (yes that is the correct spelling) in Entwistle used to sell larger. Not sure if it still does. :-)

That's not passive drinking! The "victim" is not getting damaged by the alcohol!

Excuse me, but if you check you will find that the recorded violence labelled as "drunken" violent behaviour comes from a set of people who are almost without exception known to do exactly the same things while stone cold sober. Alcohol is used as their excuse.

Alcohol does NOT *cause* violence it merely weakens social restraints or in most cases causes people to kip quietly in a corner. If you mix with a group of people that do not conform to this (quieter) generalization you need to change your social habits.

On Fri, 1 Dec 2006 21:33:30 +0000, Steven Pampling wrote (in article ):

Also it is surely the case that even though there are a lot of reports of 'alcohol related' violence it is still a only minority if you take into account all the separate acts of alcohol consumption that take place each day. Whereas how many cigarettes out of the total smoked each day are passively smoked? A large proportion I reckon.

But the primary aim of the smoking ban is not to protect people from passive smoking but to deter smoking per se. If it had only been about passive smoking, then confining smoking to separate rooms in public buildings would have achieved the objective.

Many people in the "health lobby" have said that the smoking ban sets a precedent for tackling alcohol.

I think you will find the major drive behind it is the rising tide of compensation culture. Without a ban on workplace smoking - and most "public space" areas are actually pubs, clubs, restaurants, theatres, etc which form the workplace for someone - the employers are likely to be hit with health claims and also have to suffer the sickness absenteeism that comes from secondary smoking effects. No one cared at that level until it likely to hit their profits, now the only people whinging are people who need to modify their businesses to cater more for the non-smoking majority and hadn't planned for something their bigger money colleagues were pushing. Oh, and of course the smokers aren't happy.

I can't believe that people put this argument forward!!! Having separate areas for smoking does not prevent passive smoking - how does the smoke know it's supposed to stay in that area and not drift into the rest of the pub? Have you never been in a pub with a separate smoking area and yet have had smoke drift over to where you are - I have on many occasions in may different pubs. That solution simply doesn't work.

In article , gavin writes

Another problem is that even if you do have a separate room the staff have to be in it, and what if you are with friends who are addicted to nicotine? Must you harm your health in order to retain your friends?

And if you put the smokers in a separate room with a door?

And the odd bit of passive smoking isn't going to kill anyone, is it?

Separate rooms would have answered the passive smoking argument, anything more is a blatant attack on smoking per se.

"The odd bit of passive smoking"???? Oh my goodness, I can't believe you've said that!!! I don't to smoke passively at all - and I believe that these days I am in the vast majority.

Smoking isn't a problem. Anyone who doesn't like the way things are can step outside and drink.

It's just that under the new setup it happens to be the smokers standing out in the wind and rain...

It doesn't "happen" to be like that. The majority have decided, not before time IMO, that they don't want to smoke passively any longer. I don't think it unreasonable that the minority should have to go outside.

Actually, they don't have to go anywhere. Just not smoke. I wonder if they know that a lot of cigerettes (grown with phosphate fertilisers) contain polonium 210.

E.

that's what I meant :-)