I just moved to California and love that smoking is completely banned in restaurants and bars. I lived in Las Vegas for years and that city literally sucks smokers' privatess, as compulsive gambling and chain smoking go together for some reason. Even the supermarkets allowed smoking inside because they all had banks of poker machines and the gamblers (oooh, excuuuse me, "gamers") wouldn't game unless they could smoke their filthy tobacco sticks. So now I'm much more inclined to go out to eat or visit a bar, as I can enjoy the experience without being contagioned by tobacco fumes.
As for smoking in cars, I would support a ban on it. First, there are the buttholes who smoke with their children in the car. Aside from that, my brother actually wrecked his car while smoking a tobacco stick. He had pulled out of the driveway, was just a few hundred feet down the road when he tried to light a cigarette and crashed into the neighbor's truck. For some amazing reason, the accident wasn't labeled as "tobacco-related" by police, but had I been lighting a sugar joint in a similar accident it definitely would have been labeled as "drug-related." Maybe we should go one step further and treat tobacco like we treat alcohol and illegal drugs, even a trace of nicotine in one's system while driving should be illegal.
BTW, why isn't nicotine considered a "drug" for such things? I admit to being a druggie (just not a nicotine user), and the only reason I use drugs is for the psychoactive effect. Why do smokers smoke a carton of tobacco cigarettes a day anyway? Is it for that fabulous "taste" the cigarette ads allude to?
