*** Welcome to piglix ***

Smokeasy


A smokeasy (also spelled smoke-easy or smokeeasy) is a business, especially a bar or drinking venue, which allows smoking despite a smoking ban enacted as a criminal law or an occupational safety and health regulation. The term is also used to describe locations and events promoted by tobacco companies to avoid or evade bans on smoking. The word was added to the New Oxford American Dictionary in 2005, although it was used as early as 1978. It is a portmanteau of smoking and speakeasy.

Smoking bans have been pejoratively described as a type of sumptuary law, a law that attempts to regulate habits of consumption, like the prohibition of alcohol and drug prohibition. Such prohibitions tend to trigger underground economies. For, when a sector of the population is prohibited by law from consuming a certain good, or consuming a certain good in a certain way, inevitably, some will flout that prohibition and provide the good or the means of consuming the good in a black-market fashion. Thus, just as prohibition in the United States led to the speakeasy (an establishment in which alcohol was sold in contravention of the law), so too have smoking bans led to the smokeasy.

Some smokeasy operators simply operate openly, calculating that the fines they will pay are merely a cost of doing business. Others employ stealth tactics; for example, in Philadelphia, where it is illegal to have an ashtray in the workplace, smokeasy bartenders sometimes will use cups filled with some water to serve as ashtrays. A visit from the city inspector then merely requires getting customers to extinguish their smoking materials and disposing of the cigarette butts.


...
Wikipedia

...