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  "How Ed can say "smoking would not present the slightest problem" is completely wrong, it is a proven fact that smoking and passive smoking kills, smokers have every right to smoke, their choice, but they do not have the right to pollute the air for other's, hence the smoking bans."
  
  Totally agree that passive smoking is a very bad thing and that smokers do not have the right to pollute the air for others. The point I was making was that a dedicated sealed smoking room can very easily be provided within the accommodation for active smokers. Powerful exhaust fans can continuously vent the smoke to the four winds across the grey heaving wastes with not a passive smoker in miles and just a lonely seagull to sniff the Rothmans.
  
  "It would be interesting to hear from dave on this one, a lifelong publican."
  
  Dave posted on this a few weeks ago in response to the usual 'makes my clothes smell" stuff from Barry. He said in no uncertain terms that he had run fifteen pubs and that the smoking ban was far and away the principal factor involved in the closure of so many pubs.
  
  "There is much talk about pubs/ferries/whatever being badly hit by the smoking ban/taxes/wnatever: in truth, leisure facilities change and morph to meet changing tastes and needs, those that don't or can't adapt fall by the wayside. That is human nature and market forces. "
  
  I suppose that is one way of viewing a cataclysmic body blow engendered by a total ban imposed by government diktat. The intelligent and democratic way to segregate smokers from non-smokers would have been to have permitted a proportion of pubs to be dedicated to smokers with the rest reserved for non-smokers.
  
  Anyway, I rest my case. The last thing I want to be involved in is yet another depressing thread on the rights and wrongs of smoking, with the same entrenched and intractable views regurgitated ad nauseam by both sides. I just think that it could all have been done so much more intelligently with the rights and delights of both sides being respected and without the concomittant wholesale decimation of so many of our lovely old boozers.

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