Smoke Free Restaurants Essays - Smoking, Tobacco Control

Smoke Free Restaurants According to an article in Public Health News titled "Number of ?Smoke-Free' Restaurants Soars", and published March 9, 1999, cigarette smoke contains over 4,000 chemicals and exposure to environmental smoke or secondhand smoke is responsible for 1,000 non-smoker deaths in Washington state each year. Listed below are some ideas that will help eliminate the problem of cigarette smoke ruining many meals in restaurants. In the past few years some public places have established their facilities as non-smoking out of respect of the customers health and enjoyment. Some examples are public transportation and public federal buildings. The customer respect issue regarding smoking needs to be adopted by all restaurants to avoid the nuisance of stale tobacco smells and tastes. Once solution to eliminate this problem is to create all restaurants as non-smoking. A second idea is to require all restaurants to install air purifier/cleaners. Non- smoking restaurants, enclosed smoking sections and required air purifier/cleaners offer different ways to eliminate dining in a smokey restaurant. Creating restaurants as non-smoking would avoid the problem of nicotine odors ruining many meals. The Onion, located in downtown Spokane, requires that all smoking be done in the bar area. The bar is separated from the main restaurant by a gate. I ate lunch at this restaurant, and while I was there smoke from the bar drifted to my table and spoiled my lunch. The non- smoking policy is catching on in various public places and restaurants taking on the same policy would solve this problem of spoiled meals caused by cigarette smoke. Enclosed smoking sections is also a solution to smokey restaurants.