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 ......
I couldn't figure indirect costs out. However, if we start with the fact that on average for any person the older they are, the more they cost the NHS, and that stopping smoking makes you live longer, you can see that fewer smokers is a bigger drain on the health service. Treatment for lung cancer is a fairly defined thing ... you pay for it and it works (so that's another OAP to cost the health service more) or it doesn't and you have another corpse who can't contribute to the tax base any more.
Any cost saving in terms of fewer sick days will be wiped out by the above. And besides, time off for smoking-related illness is a mere pinprick when compared to time lost due to alcohol abuse.
I suspect that as the smoking ban pigeons come home to roost, we are less likely to see any action on alcohol abuse. Quite apart from the social status of drinking compared to smoking, it's just inconceivable that any governement dare risk a similar experience with alcohol. So they'll probably rejig the ACMD to remove any need for scientific advice, which will allow them to ignore any calls for further alcohol controls.
What's that you say ? They already have. Fancy that !
You have taken a far too simplistic look at the cost of smoking to the NHS and the net contribution of smokers to the pot.
If we assume that from a packet of 20 at £5 per pack £4 is tax and multiply that by 365 the typical smoker pays about £1460 a year in tax.
In medical terms you have a term called the golden hour when someone suffers a heart attack, that golden hour costs the NHS £60,000 to treat one heart attack, the after care is even greater. You would have to smoke 20 a day for 41 years to pay for the first hour of your treatment!
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease costs a fortune and you can live for years in a semi disabled state on oxygen all the time costing the benefits system and the NHS with no net contribution. Have a heart attack and survive and your even less economically viable.
Lung cancer survival rates arent great either so that analogy isnt too strong either.
All in all smokers cost more than they generate in both tangible and intangible costs to society.
The reality is because we foolishly try to keep everyone alive for as long as possible everyone gets old and ill and requires expensive medical treatment until something eventually kills them. Smokers are no different and no more expensive, the difference is they get ill a bit younger and so have a few less years of being a senile burden on society.
All in all smokers cost society less than non-smokers without considering the huge additional taxes they pay.
I look forward to being dead while you non-smoking, 5 a day eating, healthy exercise types have another 2-3 years of dementia in an old peoples (waiting to die) home wearing nappies and being spoon fed wondering if anyone will come to see you and not being able to remember if they did.
"I look forward to being dead while you non-smoking, 5 a day eating, healthy exercise types have another 2-3 years of dementia in an old peoples (waiting to die) home wearing nappies and being spoon fed wondering if anyone will come to see you and not being able to remember if they did"
Just one of the points where you diverge from the data; smoking is associated with a significant increase in dementia. In addition to which, the increase in older fitter people is associated with an improvement in dietary habits and the loss of unhealthy ones, such as smoking, a sedentary indoor life, and so on. Another effect of smoking is arterial narrowing, leading to loss of blood supply to peripheral areas, gangrene and thence amputation. Hmm, yummy, yummy! OTOH, exercise causes arterial widening (within reason), muscular (and thus vascular) tone, a more efficient heart and therefore better circulation. Smokers go in the opposite direction and, due to the cognitive impairments to (e.g.) the basal ganglia will not think so efficiently. Thus they aren't even likely to cogitate about whether will visit them and whom, never mind the natural forgetting that follows from tobacco induced dementia.
Next?
"You have taken a far too simplistic look at the cost of smoking to the NHS and the net contribution of smokers to the pot."
Other costs include days of sickness lost, due to URTIs, which are more common in smokers due to depressed immune function. Flesh and bone tissue take longer to repair due to the effects of tobacco. Then there are the obvious cardio-pulmonary complications so often mentioned, and a host of others that all amount to a mountain of beans, including emphysema, asthma, COAD [...]. There are many ways that smoking kills, and they may not be obvious until the end. I suggest that smokers boogie on down to whyquit.com and ask themselves who they'd like to be today. It's grisly.
Being old does not necessarily mean being burden on the NHS, that's a real fact.
Smokers age much faster due to there sad pathetic nicotine addiction, but get many more deseases than the usual cancer.
In fact Cancer is one of the less likely killers for smokers. More likely is the damage done by the smoke that causes emphysema, which causes breathlessness and poor oxygenation of the blood.
This often results in early incapacity of the person, which continues until they take their last breath, as there is no cure apart from a lung transplant and why waist a good pair of lungs.
One of the main actual causes of death for smokers is pneumonia, which effect smokers far worse than non-smokers, which could be deemed as lucky for some as the later side effects of emphysema will also cause the extremities of the body to die before there time. Resulting in months or even years of ulcers until the toes, feet, fingers, hands and if they last long enough whole limbs are amputated to stop them rotting away.
There are whole set of nasty side effects of smoking and this is why the average 30 year old smoker looks like a 40 year old non-smoker.
This is nothing like the vast majority of people who enjoy a bit of alcohol, as it does not have much effect on those around them. It has even been proven that a moderate intake of alcohol (particularly red wine) improves your life expectancy.
I personally believe that anyone under the age of about 60 who smokes is just proving to the world they are a moron, that or they were abused by their parents and turned into nicotine addicts as children.
A perfect example of idiocy are those who claim not to be addicts and insist they do it because they like it!
Well if you like it so much, even when standing outside in the cold and wet stop complaining, or admit you have a problem and get help, just any other junky.
Beer: as you can enjoy it without being an addict, and unless I decide to piss the after effects on a smoker it effects no one else.
... which is an increasing land-grab of powers over the citizenry and their possessions until something has to give.
Are we any freer than we were 5 years ago ? 10 ? 15 ? Do we pay more or less tax than 5, 10, 15 years ago ?
Plot it on a graph if you like. You'll see where we're headed.
More likely to die early from (really) unpleasant diseases, until they gasp for their last breath and it doesn't come. Don't you want to see your kids grow up and get married? Enjoy a retirement with your partner?
More likely to have kids that smoke (they grow up used to the stink and don't think of it as just weird). Look upon it as your bequest to them, the same suffering you'll go through and the same early death.
Smell unpleasant (body, clothes, hair) and absolutely foul to snog.
Their kids smell unpleasant at school too. Which is hard on them.
Can't go 20, then 10, then 5, then a few minutes without coughing.
Hypocrites when they tell their kids not to take drugs. What's nicotine eh?
Donating a large chunk of their income to the government and unethical corporates. So stop whining about taxes-you're voluntarily paying more.
Responsible for large tracts of land in poor countries being used for nicotine production rather than food production.
Pollute the environment with every fag they smoke.
Switch to patches or use hypnotherapy to get off. Consume fruit, gum or even sweets (in moderation) for mouth feel, and do yourselves, your wallet, your family and the planet a favour.
Is your life so horrible that you are happy to pay, day in, day out, to end it sooner?
Seriously, it's disgusting. Chuck the habit for 2011 and have a longer, higher quality life.
Considerate smokers do not impose their smoke on those who don't want to be in it. Rude smokers don't care. So instead of treating the latter as transgressors of the standards of courtesy they are treated as transgressors of the law.
What happens when some loudly vocal group declares mobile phone use or texting in public as rude? Or the wearing of clothes of clashing colo(u)r?
Using the government and police to address social problems is lazy and stupid.
Using a mobile phone in the cinema is merely annoying. Smoking around non-smokers is actively harmful, with plenty of evidence to back it up. If the new fad of the year was going around punching random people ala Fight Club, would you call that a social problem and claim that the police shouldn't intervene?
I was in Nice last January, where it was chilly in the evenings but much warmer than home. The insides of the bars and restaurants were almost empty, with everyone eating or drinking outside - where they could still smoke. So the effect of the ban was basically zero. Much of Spain (i.e. the bits we go to on holiday) will be the same - no change, unless you were one of the tiny number of people who didn't want to sit on the terrace.
I always wondered how it was that the Spanish seemed to have arrived at a sensible position, where the many bars were divided into smoking or non-smoking, with a green or red label on the door, so that non-smokers could avoid having their otherwise pristine lungs violated.
The reason that I wondered was that I knew that this was contrary to an EU directive. I needn't have wondered, it was just the Spanish which like many Mediterranean countries, are fairly creative about such matters.
No doubt, there has been some sort of withholding of Germany's or the UK's largesse though, until they complied implicitly...
The fascist EU goes marching on, and nobody even bothers to mention it.
That smoking cost the country more than it receives in tobacco tax is a deliberate lie.
Smokers pay more tax both on tobacco and alcohol as they consume more than their non-smoking counterparts. Hence the decline in the pub business and the increase in VAT
If we believe that smokers die younger then overall they receive less pension and health care, and wont be wanting to live off our children's future earnings, whilst they trundle their zimmers around in senile circles, druling the while.
It has been suggested that smoking increases resistance to other environmental pollutants which is handy given the way the environment is going
Smoking reduces appetite, explaining where all the fit bird have gone. Obesity also kills people younger and the tubby eating machines create more CO2 due to food production and processing then smokers do even excluding the extra timber needed for the supersized upcoming door frame increases.
So in summary non-smokers are tight wads who pay less to the state in taxes but and want to live as long as possible off our children when they get to pension age. On top of that they insist on limiting the lives and pleasures of people who don't share their beliefs and insit on making all the totty into lard arses. Non-smokers should stay in a plastic bubble where the nasty world can't get at them and allow everyone else to live as they please.
>Non-smokers should stay in a plastic bubble
You've got a damn good idea there but let's not discriminate. Everyone should stay in a plastic bubble. That way I get to breathe nice clean air and the smokers can recycle their own second hand smoke. We all win. You don't have whining non-smokers stealing your offensive by product and you get to re-inhale it yourself. This will probably have the added benefit that you die even quicker so I can enjoy more of my retirement paid for by your taxes before you had become such a burden on the health service that any tax you had paid was wasted on keeping you alive.
More EU regulation.
In Germany pubs, bars and clubs can put a sticker on the door claiming they are a 'Raucher club' allowing people to smoke.
In Spain I would advise pub/bar owners to continue to allow customers to smoke, if the bar is fined then go bankrupt, sell it to yourself and open under a different name, the paper trail will make it so difficult that the police will have to give up. If enough people turn round and say stuff you the government have to give in (it is after all supposedly a democracy, and even if it wasn't Russia proves that enough people can make a difference).
The British also need to decide about whether we care about our freedom or not and similarly take proper group action.
The ONLY reason that governments get away with draconian laws and restrictions is because the public are lazy and passive. Time to wake up and get our freedom back, many of our parents/grandparents/greatgrandparents died to protect freedom and liberty and our comfy sitting on our arse doing nothing approach has allowed all of that to be removed.
I'm not even a smoker....
Grow your own tobacco ( like UK ganja farms ) and brew you own beer, start a club of smoking brewers each week going to a members house to smoke and drink his latest batch, tax free.
Unfortunately legal addicts can't get their sh*t together enough to work this out for themselves and implement it. It's a shame because it would work around all the restrictions and as distillation is legal now you could do your own spirits too.
Then you could live it up on the NHS like the non-smokers, yeah right, like there is going to be free health care in this country for much longer
"So there to the language prigs, anyone would think you French insisting on an unchanging language."
Which dictionary, Urban? :)
I'll just complain that we should not be intentionally adding completely non-logical elements to the language. What next, 'ax' becomes a valid replacement for 'ask'?
>Moaning aside, there are some with genuine cause for complaint. A few years back, all restaurants and bars over 100m2 were obliged to create dedicated smokers' areas, at not inconsiderable cost.
That's not exactly true.
For bars ans restaurants under 100m² the owned had the choice to decide whether he allowed to smoke or not, over 95% decided to allow smoking. For the over-100m² premises, if the owner wanted to allow smoking it had to create those dedicated areas; however, he was free to do not allow any smoking, in which case he need not to spend a single euro.
The markups on soft drinks are a _lot_ higher than those on alcoholic ones (A pint of coca-cola has a product cost of less than 20p to the bar, often less than 10p). Publicans would be foolish to hate such customers.
Regarding the compulsion: In every country where bars/restaurants were given a choice of not being smoke free or or putting in a smoke free area the vast majority didn't do it, or would happily let cigarette smoke pollute the "smoke free" area.
Some countries and states have gone a lot further than others. In california it's illegal to smoke outside within (iirc) 10metres of a doorway. Given patrons of the restaurant next door puffing outside and getting half of it in my windows I can understand why they took this action.
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