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I’M TALKING, OF course, about Mayor Mike Bloomberg, a former smoker who last year tightened up the city’s existing anti-smoking law so that it is now illegal to satisfy one’s nicotine craving in any indoor place—even bars and your office smoking room.
The legendary or infamous (depending on whether you’re a tobacco-totler or a nicotine addict) law finally went into effect last week amid dire predictions from restaurant and bar owners that smokers would abandon their establishments in favor of getting drunk in the one remaining place where they could do so with a lit cigarette in their hand: their own home.
Bar owners have found some unexpected allies. In fact, the smoking law has re-drawn the fault lines across all of New York’s various political tribes. Classic skeptics of government have risen to defend Bloomberg’s restrictions while conservative columnists—the same people who have exhibited not the slightest bit of professional misgiving toward President Bush—have questioned the motives of the Republican mayor, whom my local bar has dubbed “Dictator Mike.”
Yet something unanticipated is happening in New York, as resilient smokers have found a way to keep the party going. On the first Saturday night that the law was in effect, I decided to exercise my expense account to see whether New York’s nightlife was being decimated by City Hall’s little Napoleon, but I discovered that the entire city had turned into one big block party.
In fact, all the action was now occurring in front of every bar in the city, rather than inside, as packs of half-drunk smokers whooped it up on the sidewalks, meeting new friends and carousing in a scene that has now become the New York equivalent of the rolling party on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street.
All we need are “go cups.”
Instead of the sorry spectacle that you see outside every office building in town—knots of the hated smokers huddling during pathetic five-minute cigarette breaks—smokers were having the time of their lives. At one once-smoky East Village jazz bar (a jazz bar without cigarettes? Can you believe it?), even the bartender was grabbing a smoke with his customers outside while we non-smokers were inside, unserved.
Clearly the smokers are willing to give the non-smokers the moral high ground. And I can report firsthand that it’s lonely at the top of that moral high ground.
But there’s a backlash coming. Apparently, people who live in the apartments directly above these nightly block parties are displeased. A bartender on E. 7th Street told me that one of the bar’s upstairs neighbors threw buckets of water on smokers standing in front of the bar—compelling evidence that a city that once defined a bias crime as a white guy hitting a black guy with a baseball bat may now have to deal with smoker-on-non-smoker violence.
Even as a non-smoker, I find the prospect of going to a smoke-free bar appalling. It’s not that I’m sympathetic with the smokers, but I have self-interest in mind. This smoking ban is killing me, lemme tell you. Take the other night. I was out at my favorite watering hole, getting loaded on a couple of Manhattans. Well, you know how I get when I have a couple of Manhattans: I was on a roll, entertaining an entire table full of equally drunk people with a rambling monologue that touched on subjects as diverse as the French, the designated hitter rule and the appalling decline in the quality of New York bagels.
Just when I got to the climax of my story—“I mean, how could you sell a nuclear plant to Iraq, which has the world’s second-largest reserve of oil, you damn Frogs!”—half the people at table got up to go outside for a cigarette. I was left with the boring non-smokers while the party moved to the street.
If you think I’m being petty, how about this argument: I think it’s just a tad hypocritical for the government to prevent people from using a legal product—especially since that very product is the only thing keeping said government solvent right now.
The hypocrisy isn’t limited to New York City. The federal government subsidizes the tobacco growers even as it tries to discourage the use of their crop. Meanwhile, state and local governments are nicotine addicts themselves, desperate for their fix of cigarette taxes and their share of the $250-billion tobacco settlement.
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New York State, for example, is going to use $4 billion of its anticipated $9 billion windfall from the 1998 deal to close a budget gap this year. Bloomberg himself hiked New York City’s cigarette tax from 8 cents to $1.50 per pack—so high that the city treasury posted a seven-fold increase in revenue collections even though cigarette sales in the city plummeted.
The most pathetic moment in this entire episode of sanctimony happened last week. After an Illinois judge hit Philip Morris with a $12-billion judgment, several state attorneys general—from the very same states that sued Big Tobacco in the first place—said they would file motions on behalf of the company, lest it go bankrupt trying to pay off its latest damages and go out of business before sending a few billion the states’ way.
But isn’t making Philip Morris go out of business exactly why all these anti-smoking laws have been passed? No, the stated reason is workplace safety, which explains why the sight of that bartender grabbing an outdoor smoke is such a fitting symbol of anti-smoking hypocrisy.
But then again, when I got home at 2 a.m., my hair and clothes blissfully free of smoke, my wife actually groggily rolled over and cuddled—something she never did whenever I used to come home from a smoky bar.
Thanks, Dictator Mike!
Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post. His Web site is www.gersh.tv
© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.
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Perspectives
