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from the all-those-in-favour,-please-cough dept.
Austria has one of the highest rates of smoking and youth smoking among high income countries, and that might not be changing anytime soon:
Many Western countries have banned smoking in bars and restaurants, but Austria is bucking that trend. Under a law passed in 2015, Austria was due to bring in a total ban this May, but now its new government of the conservatives and the far-right Freedom Party have scrapped the plans.
The move was spearheaded by the leader of the Freedom Party, Austria's Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache, himself a smoker, who told parliament last month that it was about freedom of choice. He said restaurants should be free to decide if they want to have smoking sections, where "a citizen has the possibility to decide perhaps to enjoy a cigarette or a pipe or a cigar with their coffee".
The move has horrified Austria's medical establishment. Dr Manfred Neuberger, professor emeritus at the Medical University of Vienna, says it is "a public health disaster".
"The decision is irresponsible. It was a victory for the tobacco industry. The new government made Austria into the ashtray of Europe."
Meanwhile, the country is considering buying more jet fighters, recruiting more police, defunding its public broadcaster, and examining its past.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bradley13 on Friday February 16 2018, @07:13AM (5 children)
Why exactly can't that be up to the restaurant?
As part of her business, my wife has a small club room or restaurant. She was incredibly relieved when the law finally passed, prohibiting smoking in all restaurants. Doing it herself was almost impossible, for lots of reasons:
- Lots of people are entitled. You can't realistically designate your whole restaurant non-smoking, because you will piss off a significant fraction of your customers. So you designate smoking and non-smoking areas, which doesn't really work, because...
- ...people are still entitled jerks. You designate a smoking room, but that's not where they want to sit. Or they want to sit with their non-smoking friends, they pop out for a smoke break, and breathe out that last lungful into your non-smoking area.
- And anyway, smoking and non-smoking areas rarely work, because they are connected. We even installed a special ventilation system, but the smell still drifted across. And then someone lights up a really pungent cigar and the whole place stinks for days.
When the government finally said "no more smoking", it was a huge relief...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TheRaven on Friday February 16 2018, @10:52AM (2 children)
In the UK, when they introduced the smoking ban pubs said that they'd all go out of business because people wouldn't smoke in them anymore. I'm not sure what the statistics are, but in the months immediately following I found that several of the pubs I liked were full when I wanted to go, when previously they'd had empty tables, and the couple of landlords I spoke to said they'd sold more beer on average after the ban.
I suspect the economics are similar to restaurants serving vegetarian or gluten-free food. People with gluten intolerance may be only 5% of the population, but if you don't serve anything that they can eat then there's almost a 25% chance that any group of 5 people won't be able to eat there, which is a significant percentage of your potential customer base. The difference is that no one is negatively affected by a gluten free option on the menu, whereas everyone is negatively affected by someone spewing carcinogenic burning hydrocarbons into the air that they're trying to breathe.
Also anecdotally, just after the ban came in in France (where my mother now lives), she spoke to a waiter who had managed to give up smoking after almost 10 years of trying. It's really hard to quit smoking when you constantly have to be around smokers and the job market for waiters is such that it's hard to refuse to work in a smoking establishment. To me, this is one of the biggest arguments for the ban: the balance of power is such between employers and employees that the employees were being forced to endanger their health or lose their jobs. If you want to eliminate the ban, then you need to make employers liable for any medical care that their employees and former employees need that is related to smoke inhalation. If you have socialised heath care, then a hefty tax on smoking establishments that goes straight into the heath budget would do the trick.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday February 16 2018, @10:12PM (1 child)
And that's a truly awful argument. If there's something fundamentally wrong with the game on that level then that needs to be addressed directly at the root, not with some sort of tangential band-aid.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by dry on Friday February 16 2018, @10:58PM
Unluckily unions are out of fashion and the captains of industry have a lot more power then the average person, little well the bottom quintuple and capitalism strives to keep things this way as cheap labour to produce a cheap cup of coffee is more important then peoples well being.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Friday February 16 2018, @10:07PM (1 child)
Yes, yes you can. Many, many did. What you're telling us is that she's happy because they gave her an excuse to do what she wanted to do while still dishonestly deflecting responsibility for it.
"When the government finally said "no more smoking", it was a huge relief..."
I can see it being a huge relief for someone that wanted to ban smoking in her establishment but was not willing to do so.
However for people that preferred to allow smoking, it obviously was not.
And for people the preferred to ban it, and had in fact already banned it? Not a good thing at all. You see, just as it drove away many smokers it attracted those who were particularly bothered by the smoke, so that gave them a niche, a market that rewarded them for their choice. No longer! No smoking anywhere!
So, I'm sorry, your wife may be a very nice person and you may love her very much, but we should not screw all the people that are doing it right just to make her happy.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by dry on Friday February 16 2018, @10:55PM
Around here, before the smoking ban, a few establishments tried the smoke free experience and none of them could make a go of it, even with the free advertising from the news.
Perhaps now, a quarter of a century later, with many less smokers and people used to having none smoking establishments they could, but whether things would have got to this state without the law is open to question.