WHY THE SMOKING BAN HAS FAILED AND NEEDS CHANGE

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The idea

The smoking ban started as a way of protecting non smokers from "passive smoking" which was easy to acheive but  it ended as a way to punish smokers and non smokers as well. 1000's of pubs have closed and if you live in a village you do not just loose your pub you loose your only restaurant as well. 

It has been an ecological disaster.  I was talking to a publican whose pub now uses three times the energy it used before the ban to because he needs to heat the open air outside his pub for smokers.  A club in London this week announced that it had spent 1.8 million pounds on a smoking area with under floor and over head heating plus a hot air "curtain" all around.  Why not design houses with the radiators on the outside?

But of course there are the health benifits which we were told so much about, so why in the first 2 years of the ban did the cost of treating smoke related problems in the NHS rise by more than 10 times the rate of inflation.

France, Germany, Austria and Switzaland have learnt from the mess we have made of our legislation and all have seperate inside smoking areas as well as enclosed outside areas which are easy to light and heat when needed.

Why is it important?

Because the present smoking legislation is a commercial, ecological and medical diaster

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