New York Bars Where You Can Still Have a Smoke

Bars would close up shop, owners said. No one would come to a restaurant if they couldn't smoke in peace after a belly-filling meal. Sure, the world would be safe for the pink-lunged, white-toothed and long-of-breathed. But what about the smokers — this author included — who wanted to blacken our lungs inside, at the bar, while pickling our livers, too?

Rumors of the death of New York City nightlife were, one can safely say, greatly exaggerated. Smokers learned to simply step outside, where the elements drew them together into ever tighter, more defiant knots.

But when the ban was still being contemplated, the authorities made a concession to allay the fears some business owners had. Any bar able to demonstrate that, as of the end of 2002, more than 10 percent of its gross revenue came from the sale of tobacco products could get a special waiver from the law. As long as they didn't significantly expand or change locations, they would be little oases of smoke in a nauseatingly fresh-smelling city.

It's been nearly twelve years since the ban went into effect, but eight of those officially sanctioned smoking bars still exist, according to the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. They are glorious throwbacks to an earlier time, one with considerably more mucus and nasty brown boogers. Often unknown, even to smokers, the places carry a whiff of the illicit and the underground. Smoke-easies, if you will.

On a recent Saturday, one of those bars, Karma Lounge, on Second Avenue in the East Village, hosted a few smokers, bellied up at the bar. As snow fell outside, they puffed happily away.

The majority of the smoking bars remaining in New York are pretty smoking-forward. They're cigar bars, for the most part, with fancy humidors and the like, the kind of place you might expect to see Michael Bloomberg puffing a stogie and sipping a neat scotch that costs as much as your rent. Karma, however, is not that kind of place. It is a dive bar of the most lovable variety, with reasonably priced drinks, a friendly crowd, and ample burn marks on most available surfaces.

As one might imagine, Karma attracts its share of regulars, like Jarlath Mullahy, 40, a Dublin native and carpenter. He's here about once a week, he says. He didn't seek out the bar because of its smoking policy — he used to live around the corner and it was a regular haunt for him years ago. But he does make the trip pretty regularly, even now that he lives in Bushwick. Why does he come here, one might ask, knowing full well the answer?

"I don't know why, because I hate the fucking smell of it in my clothes," Mullahy says, with a chuckle. At home, he and his wife both smoke outside, and non-smoking bars, he says, keep him from smoking too much in one sitting. But, he says conspiratorially, "I'll tell you when it's nice — after a hard day's work, when you need a cigarette and a drink?" He claps his hands together and gestures at the bar. "Bob's your uncle."

A former Indian restaurant, Karma has the décor to match, with fringed fabric covering the doorways and dreamy red lighting. (It also has a formidable air filtration system, so it's not nearly as smoky as one might expect.) Late-Nineties-era Blackalicious is on the radio. Small tables host hookah pipes, an alternative smoke that a significant portion of the clientele prefers.

Todd McGovern, 53, a freelance writer and radio producer nursing a cigar and a drink, says he happened upon Karma just a few weeks ago. The bar doesn't do much to let people know that smoking is permitted, and he was wandering the neighborhood with a friend when they discovered the place. He says he enjoys smoking cigars here, partly because he thinks people find cigar smoke particularly objectionable, even outdoors. It's a bit of a haven; people won't bug him here.

Bartender David Machado, 35, a smoker himself, says most of the time the smoke doesn't bother him. If he's being honest, the sickly-sweet hookah fumes — he often lights them for patrons — are even less appealing than the tobacco. And while the bar puts a note on its outdoor sandwich board letting potential customers know that smoking is permitted, Machado doesn't think their unusual privilege is a huge draw, except for regulars who are in the know.

"A lot of people come in, and they're like, wait, you can smoke in here?" Machado says. "And I do know for a fact that it turns some people off." He occasionally sees parties do a U-turn at the door.

You might expect the denizens of a bar like Karma to be fiercely against the smoking ban, plotting some kind of insurrection. But while McGovern says he was wary of the ban at first — "I kind of felt like, well, if you can't smoke in a bar, where can you smoke?" — he has come around in the years since. It's no fun, he says, hanging out in a hazy bar all night.

"It's nice going to places and not having your clothes reeking of cigarette smoke," McGovern says. "People seem to have adjusted to it pretty quickly."

Machado also supports the ban, which he believes was justified, in large part, as a worker protection measure. In the old days, bartenders, servers, and other employees were forced to inhale secondhand smoke for hours on end, with all the attendant health risks that came with it. Machado says those protections were a good idea. And today, especially with a dwindling number of smoking-permitted bars, he feels like he's making an informed choice.

"I know what I'm getting into when I smoke," Machado says. "But other people who were around smoke, that's something they didn't sign up for." And besides, the ban has come with ancillary benefits. If he's out at other bars, stepping out for a cigarette can be a handy thing. "It's a good excuse to get out of awkward conversations," he says.

Mullahy feels the same way. "I've met more people because of the ban," he says. There's a certain camaraderie when you're huddled with a group of strangers, in the cold, for the sake of a habit that was never wise, and seems particularly ill-advised in the dead of winter.

"You stand outside having a menthol cigarette and it becomes a common field," Mullahy says. "You're all in the same rut."

NY Senate debating public ban on e-cigarettes

State lawmakers are considering whether to include electronic cigarettes in the state's indoor public smoking ban. The Senate Health Committee panel heard testimony Monday from health experts who said that the nicotine liquid and the vapor e-cigarettes produce could be hazardous to both consumers and the public.

The state's Clean Indoor Air Act prohibits smoking traditional cigarettes in nearly all workplaces in the state. Proponents of the ban hope that e-cigarettes will also be included, as they are in New York City as of late last month. Research hasn't yet produced a definitive answer on whether secondhand vapor is a threat to the public, but health experts believe that e-cigarette companies are marketing to teenagers and young adults with flavors like cherry, chocolate and gummy bear.

"Federal law recognizes that the purpose of these flavorings is to addict children to nicotine and create a new generation of tobacco users," said Dr. Harlan Juster, director of the health department's bureau of tobacco control.

Sen. Brad Hoylman, a Manhattan Democrat, said he has seen e-cigarettes with the image of Hello Kitty, a cartoon cat. According to the state health department, only 12 percent of high school-age kids reported having smoked a cigarette within 30 days in a 2012 survey, down from 27 percent in 2000. The health department says 88 percent of adult smokers began before the age of 18.

E-cigarettes are marketed as safer than regular cigarettes and a transitional measure to bypass quitting cold turkey, but still contain nicotine, the addictive ingredient in traditional cigarettes. Medical and public health professionals have seen no evidence that e-cigarettes help smokers quit, according to Lawrence Eisenstein, president of the state Association of County Health Officials.

Lawmakers also heard from opponents who said the ban would infringe on the rights of business owners. "The Association sees this as another attempt by government to dictate how New Yorkers run their business," said Scott Wexler, executive director of the Empire State Restaurant and Tavern Association.

Opponents suggest waiting for the Food and Drug administration's review of e-cigarettes before any legislation banning indoor smoking of e-cigarettes is enacted.

Source: Poststar

Bloomberg Seeks End to Cheap Cigarettes

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg opened a new front in his antismoking campaign last week when he proposed new legislation that would require stores to keep tobacco products out of sight, making New York the first city in the nation to do so.
 Its companion bill, however, has the potential to be just as groundbreaking, experts on tobacco control said. Along with strengthening the penalties on retailers that evade tobacco taxes, the second bill establishes a minimum price for cigarettes and cigarillos, or little cigars, of $10.50 a pack, the first time such a strategy has been used to combat smoking. The bill also prohibits retailers from redeeming coupons or offering other discounts, like two-for-one deals.

“This is kind of a landmark set of proposals here,” said Kurt Ribisl, a professor of public health at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, whose research on tobacco control influenced Mr. Bloomberg’s proposal. “For someone like me, who’s spent 18 years studying point-of-sale issues, this is kind of big.”

Dr. Ribisl studies what happens at the retail counter, where a customer at a typical convenience store sees a colorful array of signs, packaging and “shelf talkers” — the small tags that flutter from shelves — promoting two-for-one, dollar-off and other types of deals. According to a Federal Trade Commission report issued last year, the tobacco industry spent $6.5 billion on discounts in 2010, and Dr. Ribisl said they are one of the major ways cigarette makers encourage price-conscious customers like teenagers and low-income smokers to buy.

New York’s price-regulation bill would, in effect, close off the remaining means of access to cheap cigarettes and little cigars, which make it easier for teenagers to experiment with smoking, and progress to smoking regularly, said Brett Loomis, a researcher at RTI International, a nonprofit institute that offers research and technical services to governments and businesses.

City and state taxes already add $5.85 to the cost of every pack, the highest cigarette taxes in the country. About half of all states, including New York, also require wholesalers and retailers to mark the price of cigarettes up by a certain percentage. The laws were generally intended to protect business in small stores by preventing large chains from selling cigarettes below cost, as so-called loss leaders, which draw in customers.

Mr. Bloomberg’s proposal, which will be taken up by the City Council, goes beyond those laws by specifying a minimum price. The health department said $10.50 was the median price of the lowest-priced packs in more than 300 city stores. That, and the prohibition on coupons or discounts, will “thwart the tobacco companies’ ability to prey on low-income and minority smokers,” Dr. Ribisl said.

David Sutton, a spokesman for Altria, parent company of Philip Morris USA, said the city should focus on eradicating the illegal cigarette trade, rather than further restricting retailers, who are already required to perform age checks on customers.

“Piling on additional regulations designed to get at youth access when the sales compliance rate at licensed retailers is very, very high already — we just don’t think that’s the right approach,” Mr. Sutton said.

As for the ban on discounts, Mr. Bloomberg, who is accustomed to setting an example for other municipalities in public-health initiatives, from smoking bans to calorie counts, may have looked to Providence, R.I., which passed an ordinance forbidding retailers from honoring coupons and discounts last January.

Tobacco companies sued, but the federal district judge ruled for Providence, which defended its right to regulate sales and prices within the city. Though the tobacco companies have appealed, the ban went into effect on Jan. 3. Mr. Bloomberg’s tobacco-control bills are also almost certain to be challenged in court.

“We felt that these coupons and multipack discounts were a loophole,” said Providence’s mayor, Angel Taveras, “and we felt it was important to close this loophole, especially because it was a matter of life and death. We anticipated getting sued, but it was worth the fight.”

As for Mr. Bloomberg’s announcement, Mr. Taveras said he wished his crusading counterpart all the best.

“I’m not sure that he needs any advice from me,” he said.

Source: The New York Times

Bloomberg's Plan Challenges Tobacco Industry

Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York City came this week with a new plan to ban tobacco products from display in stores. Smoking displays are considered to be a bad example for young people who may acquire this habit. Several countries banned cigarettes from displays in the stores and this prevents youth from buying them.

Studies have shown that keeping cigarettes displays out of children helps to restrain them from smoking and besides this helps individuals who are trying to quit. A study that was published in January in Pediatrics magazine showed that teenagers were less likely to buy cigarettes if they shopped in stores where tobacco products were not displayed. In the USA tobacco products advertising is widely spread in ordinary retail stores and open displays of cigarettes stimulate unplanned purchases.

Kerry M. Schneider, key staff attorney for the Center for Public Health and Tobacco Policy at New England Law in Boston, said that such countries as Canada, Ireland and New Zealand have brought into action bans and it has little impact to tobacco sales at stores. It greatly helped to reduce the number of smokers among youth.

The New York city’s ban on smoking in such public places as restaurants and bars resulted in the state’s ban. Thus in 2011, the city became the largest municipality where smoking is prohibited in parks and beaches.