Thursday, June 5, 2008

Iowa Smoking Ban - what does it mean?

This piece from the Quad City Times answers some, but not all, of my outstanding questions about the Iowa state-wide smoking ban.

It implies to me, that since Tobacco Bowl a) is enclosed and b) has employees, it will not be exempted from the ban.

But I got to discussing this with a friend of mine the other night, and I came to an interesting realization:

The ban is ostensibly about public health. If consenting adults have nowhere to go to smoke in public, it will either cause them to quit or (more likely) drive them to smoke at home, espeically during the inclement weather at the peaks of summer and winter. Since certainly some of those driven home will have children, this may actually increase the health impact on children: the very group second hand smoke is shown to give the greatest risk factors to.

What do you folks think? Will the ban actually help anything?

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