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Boston

First they came for the cigarette smokers

by Jacob Grier on December 12, 2008

Today the Boston City Council approved its measure banning the few remaining smoke-friendly businesses in the city. How bad is the new ban? Here’s City Councilor Michael Ross and restaurant owner Lydia Shire writing in the Boston Herald against it:

In these difficult times every small business is important. There are but six cigar bars in Boston, all of which undergo an annual local licensing process, exhibiting that 60 percent of their sales are from the sale of tobacco-related products and that the appropriate signage reflecting the risks of tobacco use is visible.

All six small businesses will be shut down if the regulations are passed as written. Even if these regulations are altered to temporarily grandfather in these six establishments, it is not reasonable to ask small business owners to maintain their significant investment in their communities, only to be shut down despite their commitment to be good businesses and neighbors.

They also note that the ban will extend to outdoor seating areas, unfairly punishing business owners who invested in patios to comply with the original smoking ban four years ago. Ross and Shire deserve full credit for opposing this rampant paternalism. Yet they’re a little late to the party. Note that they both support the earlier ban on smoking in bars and restaurants; they’re only stepping up now because they’re among those “who care to enjoy the pairing of a cigar and a glass of wine following dinner at one of Boston’s excellent restaurants.” Well la dee dah. If they’re not willing to be equally vigorous in their support of the property rights of sports bar owners or smokers who want to have a cigarette while they take in a music show, they have no right to be surprised when the city steps in to take away their precious postprandial maduros. The difference in the new ban and the original is one of degree, not of principle, and this is exactly the sort of thing we libertarians warned governments were heading towards when the original, less restrictive bans came into force. Now they expect city councils to draw a line protecting elitist cigar smokers like themselves? Give me a break. (And I say this as a fellow elitist cigar smoker.)

There is one interesting wrinkle though. The cigar and hookah bar ban was amended to not go into effect for ten years, with the possibility of one ten year extension after that. Twenty years is a long time, perhaps long enough for cooler heads to prevail; for now it lets the council look tough without actually hurting the businesses. Even so, how sickening is this excerpt from the AP report?

Roger Swartz, who heads the commission’s community initiatives bureau, said the panel lengthened the grace period for the bars because of hard economic times.

“We wanted to give them a bit more time to get used to the idea that they’ll have to close,” Swartz said.

Oh, how very nice of you Roger. You say that as though the bars’ closing was an inevitable event delayed only by the grace of Boston’s benevolent politicians, when you in fact are the ones driving them out of business. How does a person become so self-righteous that they can take credit for protecting small businesses on the same day they forbid their existence?

Today the Boston Public Health Commission justifies the slippery slope arguments made by property rights defenders many years ago. We were told that we shouldn’t worry, that the smoking bans in bars and restaurants were reasonable, and that sufficient accommodations for smokers would be made. Now we see that no ban is strict enough for the public health nannies, that even six cigar bars in a city of more than 600,000 people is too many. The regulators will, perhaps, finally overreach and create a backlash, but by then much of the damage to business owners will be done.

[Hat tip: The Stogie Guys.]

Previously:
Not a war on smokers?

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Not a war on smokers?

by Jacob Grier on September 12, 2008

Boston has banned smoking in bars and restaurants since 2003. That legislation forbade lighting up indoors in almost all businesses. The only exceptions were for cigar and hookah bars and for tobacco shops, all of which must get at least 60% of their revenues from tobacco sales. Making more money from tobacco than from drinks is very hard to do, so as you can imagine it’s not easy for smokers to find a place to enjoy a Scotch with their stogies. Non-smokers have no trouble finding places to accommodate their preference, whether as employees or as customers.

This isn’t enough for the Boston Public Health Commission. They passed a new measure this week to ban smoking in businesses of any kind, including tobacco shops. Nor can smokers be told to step outside. A cavalier response in the Boston winter under any circumstances, even that cold comfort will be taken away under the law: Outdoor patios will be forced to go smokefree as well. Denny Crane will always have his grand balcony, but we lesser mortals will have no place left to gather in Beantown.

This measure goes beyond any plausible justification of improving the public health to attempting to stamp out an unpopular lifestyle. This is a direct assault on the property rights and freedom of association of smokers, who are now being told that their hobby is uniquely unworthy of legal protection. And this is exactly where we defenders of property rights warned we were headed when less restrictive smoking bans became en vogue.

[Hat tip: The Stogie Guys.]

Previously:
Smoking ban mission creep
Bans vs. freedom of association
The most decadent night of my life

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Pharmacies, bars, what’s the difference?

by Jacob Grier on September 5, 2008

Michael Siegel writes this week about San Francisco and Boston’s forthcoming regulations to ban the sale of cigarettes in pharmacies:

According to the Globe article, the reason for the ban on tobacco sales at pharmacies and on college campuses is that selling tobacco is inconsistent with the mission of these institutions: “the city decided to target sales at the 74 pharmacies in Boston … because stocking tobacco, the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, is incompatible with the mission of a drugstore. ‘Why, in a place where people go to get healthy and get information about staying healthy, would you want to sell something that has absolutely no redeeming value and ends up killing a lot of people?’ said Ferrer, executive director of the Boston Public Health Commission.” [...]

[T]hese regulations are not going to advance any direct protection of the public’s health. They are not intended to directly improve the public’s health. Instead, the intention is to prevent certain retail establishments from taking an action that is viewed as being inconsistent with their mission. In other words, the regulation is intended not to regulate the public’s health, but to regulate the consistency of a mission of a store with its actions.

I just don’t see the role of government in regulating the consistency of stores’ mission and actions.

I agree. However the logic behind bans on smoking in restaurants and bars, measures that Siegel supports, isn’t very different. The laws assume that providing patrons with a place to smoke together is not essential to the mission of serving food and drink and can therefore be legislated away for the safety of the workers. If it was essential, then presumably employees would be allowed to assume the risks as they do in so many far more dangerous industries.

Allowing smoking is clearly part of the mission for many bars and restaurants. Some bans take this into account by allowing for exceptions, but these are usually far too strict. Some bans make no exceptions at all. This is coercive against smokers who can no longer find places to associate together, against business owners who can’t set their own policies, and against workers who may prefer that environment. If Siegel really values autonomy, this ought to be a concern for him.

(Note that opposing bans would still leave plenty of options on the table for reducing smoking in bars and restaurants, such as offering tax breaks to businesses that go smoke free. Opposing bans would not necessarily entail giving up on public health.)

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