By Lauren M. Whaley
Smokers have only a few months left to take public drags on their cancer sticks while straddling saddle barstools at the Cowboy or while playing pool at the Rancher’s Town Meetings.
Kelsey Dayton reported in Wednesday’s News&Guide that the two bars announced plans to go smoke free, leaving only three bars in the county where people are free to inhale tobacco.
While the Virginian, The Log Cabin and Horse Creek Inn are resisting change, every other establishment has voluntarily banned smoking, making Teton County one of the most smoke free places in the state.
Some studies even show the move is actually good for business.
Still, Laramie, Cheyenne and Evanston are ahead of us (or annoyingly liberal, depending on your black-lung stance) with ordinances banning smoking up to 10 feet away from public businesses.
The local bars’ announcement comes just weeks after another substance discussion. The Wyoming legislture just decided to ban open containers in cars!
Now, not only can I not smoke at the Cowboy, I can’t even pre-game en route. To some, this must seem like lawmakers have their hands too deep in public business. (Although to this, one could bring up the weighty legal and moral issue of companies mass-disseminating products so harmful to humans that they are ban-worthy.)
If Wyoming banned smoking statewide, it would join the ranks of New York, California and Delaware, who have the some of most stringent indoor smoking policies in the nation.
While many people still think smoking looks cool, these measures promise to improve the health of tens of thousands of employees and patrons – and aren’t healthier people hotter, happier and nicer to be around anyway? This is a good thing, right?
New York took “health” a step further in 2003 when the New York City Board of Health voted unanimously to move forward with plans to stop the city’s 20,000 restaurants from serving food that contains more than a minute amount of artificial trans fats, the chemically modified ingredients that increases the risk of coronary heart disease.
After its proposed smoking ban, will Wyoming follow suit?
For those those who oppose such measures, I can kind of see where they’re coming from:
First open containers, now cigarettes?
What’s next? french fries?
(All I can say is thank god for the national parks and national forests: There’s nothing more refreshing than finishing a climb in Death Canyon and inhaling the sweet cigar smoke of Phelps Lake Overlookers. Hopefully, we’ll always have the true portrait of badassness: beating all your friends up Glory with a fag dangling from your lips.)
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so if you cant smoke in such resturants or bars why wouldn’t you just get up one day and realise that sugar is now a bad thing. There is extreamists everywhere dont get me wrong and i am a smoker and i understand banning it but you also have to look at freedom in this situation. Takeing away freedom sets a trend for those extreamist to make there world the way they want it, without considering others which is like taking everyone else’s voice out of the equasion which isn’t fair to the rest of us. I might only be nineteen and not even from jackson but what happens around the state affects the whole populus of Wyoming. I figure that is a good reason to voice my freedoms before they have enough power to eliminate that to. It might be a crazy idea but it could very well happen one day,not to me but to further generations!