Anti-tobacco, get stuffed. Smoking is cool.
Today we went out for a meal courtesy of my lovely in-laws. We went to one of our favorite place in Leeds, the Sahara. For for £7 you get turkey platter piled 6 inches high with lamb and couscous. Awesome. It is a delicious restaurant and also a 24-hour sheesha bar. Sheesha is a tobacco/fruit mash that you smoke out of these massive hookahs (like the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland). It is tasty and immensely relaxing to have a sheesha and recline on the dumpy sofas and listen to Arabic music. They also serve a delicious mint tea.
However, because of the current tobacco paranoia (funded largely by pharmaceutical companies who sell very expensive nicotine patches) the UK is going to have a tobacco ban starting in July. That means that a whole industry of sheesha bars in going to be shut down in a Nazi-style clamp down. That is lame, really lame. The sheesha bar was a sort of weekend safe haven for normal folks in Leeds. Downtown Leeds is a scary place on weekends, the best comparison I've heard was my lecturer who compared it to the opening seen from Space Odyssey: 2001, when all the apes are smashing each other up with rocks and bones. Anyways, prohibition sucks. I am beginning to seriously worry that things like milkshakes and cheeseburgers might soon be contraband. I have no desire to live forever (at least not in this body), so public health should leave me alone dagsnabbit!
posted by Drewfasa @ 19:08
9 Comments:
Chin up, Drew - businesses will always find ways to get around legislation. The sheesha bars in this town remain open because they "reclassified" themselves as businesses... so there's hope. Plus! One thing the prohibition did - underground clubs where women and men could drink and socialize together - was an interesting result. Now, birthing the Mob was another, but I suppose the neighbourhood is wild enough; you might not notice a bunch of Mobsters running sheesha.
-d
Thanks Danielle, you have been the more encouraging, sympathetic ear to my anti-tobacco griping, and I will take courage in your faith that the black market will find a way.
And I am the antagonist to your smoking and hookahs (I hope that's not just how the british pronounce hookers). Drew, the reason they ban tobacco is because it's bad for you. Even if you don't want to live forever, do you want to live a good life for a short amount of time, or a significantly crappier life for a shorter amount of time?
Hehe, Kyle, you engage in an activity which is much more likely to shorten/spoil your life than my pipe/cigar/shisha smoking: motorcycling! And I have a feeling you'd be PO'd if some group of angry mothers made it so you weren't allowed to ride yo' bike :p
The things is this: the anti-tobacco lobby is totally indiscriminate. The health risks from all other tobacco products (barring cigarettes and chewing tobacco) are insignificant. In the 1964 surgeon general's report on tobacco usage (that was the report that firmly established the link between cigarettes and dying) pipe smokers were actually found to live 20% longer than non-smokers!
Aside from that, I'm curious about another thing. The government justifies punitive tobacco taxes by saying "it's to pay for the expensive health care of smokers". Leaving aside for a moment the backwards logic in that argument (I certainly hope that the government won't increase the tax on snowboarding equipment or Big Macs, or motorcycles), I have to wonder which costs more to Canada's health care system: a smoker who dies of inoperable lung-cancer, or a non-smoker who spends the last 15-years of their life crapping their pants and eating strained carrots? This also applies to your question of whether I want to live a good short life, or a crappy shorter life (no pun intended).
Most seniors are not crapping their pants and eating strained carrots. A very small percentage of older adults live in continuing care facilities...most are very independent and healthy. And you can reduce your chances of wearing diapers and losing your mind by living a healthy lifestyle.
Sweet, I totally didn't want to wear diapers or eat baby-food, except perhaps for arrow-root crackers. Mmmmm.
Anyways, wearing wool caps and smoking pipes seems to be the best thing about being old (as well as golfing and taking out your dentures for your grandchildren's amusement). I would like the right to do all of these if I so choose.
Hey there Drew.
when nothing else seems to lift the monotony, your hilarious cynicism makes the difference. Thanks for the laugh. Q:tobacco won't be banned entirely from personal use, will it? Not that I am a huge advocate of smokers rights, but I think you put it in a more realistic perspective than those who stand to gain from doing otherwise.
Drew, we were getting donairs tonight at our favourite Lebanese deli, and Martin had quite the idea. I thought I would pass it on: Buy your very own hookah!
Now, they probably cost a blinking fortune: 70 pounds?
You could start a fund, and donate the rest to cancer research.
Actually they don't cost a whole heckuva lot. I think they're in the neighborhood of a couple hundred (Canadian). How do I know this? Well let me tell you! The Student's Union here at the U of Alberta runs their own bar/pub/establishment that has been a grossly underacheiving drain on the SU budget for the last 4 years at least. Seriously in the red each time. So what ingenious idea does some VP come up with? Buy a bunch of these hookahs to try and draw students in. You know, try and de-stress the whole student body by smoking. Needless to say, when the rest of the SU found out what this one VP was doing he got shot down faster than a Liberal in the Alberta legislature. I found it amusing that my SU was contemplating making a profit off of something that's banned in England.
But the fact that it's banned in England is even more amusing. Most of the time society preaches a "do whatever is right for you" message. And in my opinion, if smoking is your thing, then fine! Is it a health care drain? Maybe, but I'm pretty sure that the government makes it a point to tax the sales of tobacco too. They've got that covered a-OK. But increasingly they're telling smokers that they CAN'T do whatever is right for them... they don't quite fit within the bounds of what society means when it says "do whatever you want". That's why I don't like anti-smoking legislation. Because it's only a matter of time before they move past simple substance control and start controlling a whole lot more... because it's what society has decided is bad for you.
And that's about as Orwellian as I'll get with this. :o)
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