blue laws

Generally, I am only keenly aware of the restrictions against smoking when corralled through security after a trans-Atlantic flight. The labyrinthine shepherding through the airport, hermetically sealed and no chance of escape is maddening. Already the ban on smoking in bars and restaurants is over four years old, and though it is no hardship and actually more pleasant all around—although I have not really just gone out for a drink or stayed for more than one, since the rules went into effect, it does strike me as strange that the whole of Europe could screw its collective nerve and resolve to a comprehensive ban that was not universally favoured. One still sees a lot of smoking in thresholds and out-of-doors during nice weather, but it is hard to dispel images of soupy smoke in cafes and pubs, and even as some businesses contemplate the unthinkable, relaxing the ban, there is a certain stale smell of revision—not that some establishments might be allowed to go back to the way things were before, but rather that smoking indoors was never permitted, except in the movies. Bavaria instituted some of the most stringent restrictions, to later back away from a few that were over-reaching, and there’s yet this funny legal steering to get around the letter of the law, with smoking “clubs” that are not open to the general public and only to dues-paying members, or the elaborate (and rather kosher-sounding) work-around of having a tent erected inside a community centre, since one could smoke in a tent. The powerful tobacco lobby in the Netherlands is making it possible for bars that are tended and staffed only by one person who owns the establishment to permit smoking. This sort of conditional dispensation is even more strange.