The Denver airport is among the more smoker-friendly airports, historically speaking. It’s not quite as great the one in Salt Lake City, but they at least have a few private establishments where they allow people to smoke in piece. No more, though. They’re down to only one, and the signs are that one will be going away in 2018 as soon as the lease expires in 2018.

I understand that we do not want to go back to the days when smokers were rampant and their smoke was nigh-impossible to escape. But seriously, are we reaching the point where room cannot be made in an airport of however many square feet? That it is just too much of an imposition on non-smokers that smokers have a single place rather than a Jamba Juice?

I really do wonder the extent to which it is no longer the second-hand smoke that is required to bother other people to justify a ban, but the notion of being bothered by people smoking. The rubber will hit the road when it comes to ecigarettes and what kind of restrictions we place on them. I made note of the fact that Starbucks is banning them along with regular cigarettes on their property. Brandon Berg made a good point that this may simply be a measure to avoid having to police whether it’s smoke or vapor coming out of the thing that the guy or girl has between her fingers.

Maybe so. At least, that’ll be the rationale that most people rely on. A part of me wonders the extent to which we have really reached the point where smoking, or vaping, is to be considered such shameful behavior that it is to be pushed out of public view altogether regardless of the harm or lack thereof of people around. Which wouldn’t be a completely bad thing (if the ecigarettes take off, I will try not to use them in Lain’s sight), but overlooks rather obvious problems.

Namely, that smokers are going to smoke somewhere unless you go the route of Hawaii or Albuquerque (even there, I’m told that you should simply ask an employee who smells like cigarette smoke and they’ll tell ya). Preventing them from having a lounge in the Denver airport is going to cause a non-trivial number of them to clutter up the security lines re-entering.


Category: Road

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3 Responses to The End of Smoking In DIA

  1. Sheila Tone says:

    But it’s BAD for you! Bad, bad, BAD! So we must treat people who do it badly.

  2. mike shupp says:

    From the current American Spectator: <a href="http://spectator.org/archives/2013/07/15/latest-obamacare-foul-up-favor&quot;

    The Right Prescription

    Latest Obamacare Foul-Up Favors Smokers

    By David Catron on 7.15.13 @ 6:09AM

    HHS computer glitch forces non-smokers to subsidize the President’s fellow nicotine fiends.

    ——–

    So it’s liberals who look out for smokers these days and true blue conservatives hate them. All part of defending Liberty in the modern age!

    • trumwill says:

      Smoking has a bipartisan component, though it’s generally been getting more partisan over the years. On the other hand, conservatives never miss an opportunity to hate on Obama, so we get this.

      (Which is misguided, because in the end smokers will end up subsidizing everybody else, comparatively speaking, because they die sooner.)

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