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CIGAR RIGHTS OF AMERICA
STOP THE PROPOSED SMOKING BAN
IN LOS ANGELES
LOS ANGELES COUNCILMAN WANTS TO BAN
SMOKING ALMOST EVERYWHERE
Almost 100 years ago, the United States tried Prohibition of alcoholic beverages and it was a miserable failure. You would think people would have learned.
Not if you're Los Angeles City Councilman Bernard Parks.
In a difficult election campaign against State Senator Mark Ridley-Thomas in the November race for a Los Angeles County Supervisor position, Parks has decided to garner public attention by trying to make criminals out of about 384,000 citizens of the City of Los Angeles and 988,998 in the County of Los Angeles.
He wants to ban smoking anywhere two people might stand together. On street corners, on the sidewalk, in a parking lot, anywhere you can think of in public, and even on private property.
His August 8 motion (no. 08-2123), asking the City Attorney to draft an ordinance to "enact a second-hand smoking law effective throughout the City which would limit public exposure to secondhand smoke in all public areas and common areas where people congregate including, but not limited to, but not limited to indoor and outdoor businesses, hotels, parks, apartment common areas, restaurants and bars, and beaches."
This is only the latest grandstanding gesture against smoking, but if an ordinance is drafted along these lines and passed, it would be devastating for cigar smokers, who are certainly not part of the "voluntary addiction" that Parks insists make up the smoking population in Los Angeles.
If passed as outlined, this ban would:
- Eliminate smoking in all cigar shops in the City of Los Angeles;
- Eliminate smoking on the streets of Los Angeles;
- Eliminate smoking in all outdoor areas, such as the patios or lawns of hotels;
- Eliminate cigar smoking in outdoor areas of restaurants;
- End cigar events as we know them in the entire City of Los Angeles;
- Eliminate smoking in common areas of apartment buildings!
The specter of having smokers arrested on the street, or having police summoned to an apartment or condominium complex to answer the complaint of a neighbor who accuses someone next door of smoking is almost too much to contemplate. The secret to the success of the Gestapo in Nazi Germany wasn't so much their investigative powers, but the willingness of neighbors to turn in their neighbors, much like accusations of witchcraft in the 17th Century. Parks, a former chief of police, now wants to bring the same circumstances to Los Angeles. And Parks also introduced a (non-binding) Resolution asking the County of Los Angeles to implement the same kind of law.
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