Please increase TAX on all smoked items, including e-cigs. Be bold add 50% to cost to set an example !

Yes, this will kill a couple business, but, the greater good is health for ALL !!!!

The ban includes weed too, right!!?

So who is going to enforce this rule downtown? The shop owners? I think not, why eliminate potential customers by asking them not to smoke in front of your store or restaurant. Call the police? I can't get them to come fast enough to get handicap parking violators, good luck having them curb smokers. I have no problem with e-cigs, at least I don't have to smell them.

I am happy to ask smokers in front of my store to move along. If you have smoked in front of my store on Main Street, you have already been yelled at. My brides, my staff, and I do not need to be subjected to your smoke. I do not want my dresses to smell like smoke.

Please ban smoking downtown.

I agree with LC, tax smoking products at extreme levels -- $25 per pack? -- and keep adding it up until people cannot afford it. I also think that any smoking caused illness should not be covered by insurance. Got lung cancer from smoking? Pay up front or no medical treatment.

Add banning of wood burning fireplaces and we will help everyone's health.

Due to repeated violations of our Terms of Use, comments from this poster are automatically removed. Why?

I love "sin" taxes. One area where I do appreciate what our state has done. It's a health issue, it's a nuisance, spend anytime in another state with "smoking and non smoking" sections in a restaurant and the appreciation for what our state has done is understood.

You can't smoke anywhere, but you can drink everywhere. Smoking in movies changes the rating, but in a movie there can be 100 adults in a scene and everyone can be drinking alcohol, and that could be in a family friendly movie. Smoking is "bad" for everyone's health, but drinking and driving, doing drugs and driving is on the rise. Yet we continue to encourage lax marijuana laws, and perpetuate the idea that we need alcohol to have a good time, and at our festivals, parades, and events. Our society is dumb and hypocritical.

I hope this does include marijuana. I don't know how many times I have been subjected to marijuana smoke just walking down the street. The police won't do anything about it because they just say they probably have a medical license. I lived in Stoneridge apartments for a while and throughout the warm months when I wanted my windows open, my apartment would be filled with marijuana smoke every single night from someone smoking on their balcony below me. I had no recourse because they had "a medical license." It doesn't have to and probably shouldn't be "smoked" for medical use. But, these new restrictions are great progress. Let's keep it going.

DA makes a few good points about other things being bad, or even worse for us than smoking. However, your drinking and your drug use do not force me to consume or breathe what you are doing. Smoking makes all of us victims.

I strongly believe that when your drinking or drug use does affect me -- while driving for instance, the user should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. Kill someone while driving drunk or on drugs? Life in prison, no parole. Period. But if you choose to drink in your own home, have at it and keep away from your car.

Chemical analysis of exhaled human breath using a terahertz spectroscopic approach
2013

“As many as 3500 chemicals are reported in exhaled human breath. Many of these chemicals are linked to certain health conditions and environmental exposures. This experiment demonstrated a method of breath analysis utilizing a high resolution spectroscopic technique for the detection of ethanol, methanol, and acetone in the exhaled breath of a person who consumed alcohol. This technique is applicable to a wide range of polar molecules. For select species, unambiguous detection in a part per trillion dilution range with a total sample size in a femtomol range is feasible.”
http: //scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/apl/103/13/10.1063/1.4823544

“Cynthia Lyons, East Sussex County Council acting director of public health, said, “Second hand smoke can harm our health and contains over 4,000 chemicals, some of which are known to cause cancer.”

Well compared to the 3500 chemicals reported in human breath, some of them known to cause contagion, Cynthia Lyons’ concern over only 4,000 seems quite pathetic,

I don’t particularly want to breath the contents of some stranger’s lungs either, but up until now had considered it unavoidable.
Of course banning other people breathing in all enclosed public spaces would be impracticable – compulsory masks, perhaps?

This pretty well destroys the Myth of second hand smoke:


Lungs from pack-a-day smokers safe for transplant, study finds.

By JoNel Aleccia, Staff Writer, NBC News.

Using lung transplants from heavy smokers may sound like a cruel joke, but a new study finds that organs taken from people who puffed a pack a day for more than 20 years are likely safe.


Ive done the math here and this is how it works out with second ahnd smoke and people inhaling it!

The 16 cities study conducted by the U.S. DEPT OF ENERGY and later by Oakridge National laboratories discovered:

Cigarette smoke, bartenders annual exposure to smoke rises, at most, to the equivalent of 6 cigarettes/year.

146,000 CIGARETTES SMOKED IN 20 YEARS AT 1 PACK A DAY.

A bartender would have to work in second hand smoke for 2433 years to get an equivalent dose.

Then the average non-smoker in a ventilated restaurant for an hour would have to go back and forth each day for 119,000 years to get an equivalent 20 years of smoking a pack a day! Pretty well impossible ehh!

OSHA also took on the passive smoking fraud and this is what came of it:


Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence: Third Edition



This sorta says it all

These limits generally are based on assessments of health risk and calculations of concentrations that are associated with what the regulators believe to be negligibly small risks. The calculations are made after first identifying the total dose of a chemical that is safe (poses a negligible risk) and then determining the concentration of that chemical in the medium of concern that should not be exceeded if exposed individuals (typically those at the high end of media contact) are not to incur a dose greater than the safe one.

So OSHA standards are what is the guideline for what is acceptable ''SAFE LEVELS''

OSHA SAFE LEVELS

All this is in a small sealed room 9x20 and must occur in ONE HOUR.

For Benzo[a]pyrene, 222,000 cigarettes.

"For Acetone, 118,000 cigarettes.

"Toluene would require 50,000 packs of simultaneously smoldering cigarettes.

Acetaldehyde or Hydrazine, more than 14,000 smokers would need to light up.

"For Hydroquinone, "only" 1250 cigarettes.

For arsenic 2 million 500,000 smokers at one time.

The same number of cigarettes required for the other so called chemicals in shs/ets will have the same outcomes.

So, OSHA finally makes a statement on shs/ets :

Field studies of environmental tobacco smoke indicate that under normal conditions, the components in tobacco smoke are diluted below existing Permissible Exposure Levels (PELS.) as referenced in the Air Contaminant Standard (29 CFR 1910.1000)...It would be very rare to find a workplace with so much smoking that any individual PEL would be exceeded." -Letter From Greg Watchman, Acting Sec'y, OSHA.

Why are their any smoking bans at all they have absolutely no validity to the courts or to science!

I hear a hookah lounge is thinking of opening somewhere downtown.
seems like the temperance movement wants to stop drinking, again. so why not bring the smoke indoors.

@danielhammond,

I hope you're joking. If not, happy trolling!

I agree that we have a double standard for smoking and drinking. You are correct they are not viewed the same. I don't smoke, I really hate being around others that do (I don't think they're bad people, I just don't enjoy the smell and how I feel after), and especially in areas where smoking is allowed (out of state restaurants).

I'll continue to vote for taxes on cigarettes.

Oh and vaping just looks really stupid while we are on the topic. We should tax the hell out of that.

@Al: Have you ever been in downtown Pleasanton? There are no (zippo) handicap parking places for the Police to enforce.