Even though it’s the UK’s next door neighbour, I never seem to hear much in the way of news on how the French smoking ban is playing out. So H/T Jredheadedgirl in Lousiana for this snippet of news:
More smokers lighting up at work
Five years after France introduced a smoking ban in public places, a new report says more people are flouting the rules, particularly at work.
Rules introduced five years ago banned smoking in all public places, including restaurants, cafés and the workplace.
Yet the survey conducted for anti-smoking group Droits des Non-Fumeurs (Non-Smokers Rights) found that 64 percent of those questioned said they had seen people smoking in places where it is banned.
A big jump was recorded in incidents of people smoking at work.
In 2008, a similar survey found that just eight percent of people had been exposed to cigarette smoke at work. By 2009 this had risen to 21 percent.
The most recent survey, conducted in December, found that 36 percent of those questioned had been in the presence of people smoking while at work.
A third of people also said they’d been exposed to smoke in cafés and restaurants.
The organisation is calling for an increase in the number of inspections to stamp out the rise.
Sounds like more and more French people are just ignoring the ban. Which is pretty much in line with other bits of news I’ve heard on and off over the past few years.
It seems that some people are law-abiding and others are not. Scots and Irish and Brits seem to obey the law. So do Dutch and Danish and Germans. Probably Norwegians and Swedes too. Everyone else seems to just carry on as if nothing had happened.
The same seems to apply with the EU, whose current difficulties seem to stem from the northerners sticking to the rules, and the southerners playing fast and loose (although it seems this may be a tad unfair: the northerners just change the rules when they step outside them).
…who can blame the Greeks when the main drivers of the euro, France and Germany, were so badly behaved? In 2003, both countries spent too much and their budget deficits rose above the 3 per cent limit. They simply persuaded friendly finance ministers, including Gordon Brown, to vote for no penalties to be imposed.
Perhaps it’s just the different cultures, or maybe it’s because the infrastructure of northern countries is more highly developed than in the south. And practically that means that the authorities – i.e. the police – can get anywhere very quickly along the highly developed roads of northern Europe, and stamp out civil disobedience quickly. But when villages are isolated along narrow roads, deep in mountains, it’s a lot harder for plod to keep control, and so isolated communities make their own rules. And I suspect that there are a lot of places in southern Europe which are pretty isolated in this way, and have been that way for centuries. I can well imagine there are quite a few places in the USA which aren’t very much different. The Appalachians springs to mind, for no particular reason other than it used to be hillbilly country.
And what applies in respect of the country as a whole applies even more so in cities, where the authorities can get anywhere in minutes. Which is perhaps why smoking bans often seem to appear in cities (like San Francisco or New York). In cities they’re much easier to police.
It’s much the same in a country like Britain, with lots of good roads. I think that, starting out in the centre of England, you could drive almost anywhere in England in two or three hours. And that’s how quickly the police or the army or the antismoking hit squads are likely to get to your pub once somebody lights up at the bar. And everybody knows it.
But if you live in a little hamlet at the end of a windy, mountainous dirt road, you have little to fear. You’ll see the lights of the police convoy coming up the valley an hour before they arrive, and you’ll have opened the windows and cleared all the ashtrays away long before they finally show up.
So maybe it’s got nothing to do with culture, and everything to do with infrastructure. And since France gets a hefty subsidy from the EU Common Agricultural Policy for its rather antiquated farms, maybe that has ensured that much of France remains much the way it was 100 years ago, dirt roads, smoky bistros, and all.
Anyway, I’m glad to hear the French are mounting their own kind of résistance to what often seems to me like (and may well actually be) an alien invasion of the entire planet by antismoking zombies. Perhaps the RAF could drop essential supplies of tobacco over occupied France? Or, more appropriately, perhaps the French Air Force – l’Armée de l’Air – could drop essential tobacco supplies over occupied Britain, guided by beacons on the ground comme dans la guerre?
Maybe I should get one of those laser torches so that I can signal to them where to drop the Gitanes and Gauloises. Et les pains au chocolat, et les éclairs, et les croquembouches. Ici, ici! Dans le coin du champ, s’il vous plaît. Vive la France! À bas les anti-fumeurs!
I understood what happened in Ireland: The Antismokers played their trump card of enslaving the pub-owners to act as untrained, unpaid, uninsured, and highly-vulnerable Citizen Vigilante Enforcers. And even in rural Ireland, or perhaps especially in rural Ireland, the pub owners, because of their personal connections and friendships with their patrons, were respected by those patrons and thus the smokers moved outside largely without even being asked.
I never understood what happened in France though: The smoking ban was definitely a “Made In America” import. I had always understood the French to be almost violently disdainful of anything American. So how they came to accept and cooperate with their ban in the first place was always a mystery to me. The only explanation I can think of is that because of the very high smoking rate in France its possible that the pubs truly were unreasonably smoky … so much so that even smokers might have been bothered at times. When I was visiting The Netherlands I saw many pubs where the air systems were so well done that you couldn’t even tell that smoking was allowed when you first walked in — despite many smokers actively smoking! But I also went to a couple where the smoke was thicker than anything I recalled seeing since the 1970s: literal thick wafting coherent clouds of smoke weaving among and under the lights and over the pool tables and such.
If the true force behind the antismoking movement had been just cleaner and more comfortable air for nonsmokers, ventilation and filtration systems would have been the solution. Of course, as we know, the movement was hijacked by the social engineers in the mid 70s and the bans were insisted on simply as a means of “shocking” the naughty lab rats who insisted on defying the educational “nudges for their own good.”
- MJM
One could say that cigarettes are themselves Made In America, and are themselves as much cultural exports as smoking bans. Funny that both tobacco and tobacco bans come from America.
http://rmiglobal.org/2011/09/17/the-nicotine-advantage-anti-doping-agency-practically-endorses-smoking/
hmm..
The performance-enhancing effects of nicotine included increased “vigilance and cognitive function,” and reduced stress and body weight. “Interestingly, nicotine also triggers a significant increase of pulse rate, blood pressure, blood sugar and epinephrine release owing to simultaneous stimulant and relaxant properties,” the report said.
“So maybe it’s got nothing to do with culture, and everything to do with infrastructure.”
There may also be a certain amount the rural vs urban effect in the way these rules are enforced.
In rural areas, every one knows every one and the nannies tend to be laughed at and shunned.
The North vs South may be due to weather conditions. I n extreme/moderate cold climates there is much more reliance on the group working together to survive.
Thus, group rules are more closely followed.
I think weather conditions must be part of it. For the reason you give. And perhaps also because people have to work harder to stay alive in the north, building more substantial houses that are warmed by fires, wearing more clothes and stouter shoes, and very often eating more food. In such circumstances, a certain parsimony is encouraged. “Waste not, want not,” and (in England), “Look after the pennies, and the pounds will look after themselves,” and so on.
Great post Frank! It makes sense to assume that geography influences the outcome of laws and how they are enforced; that’s a given. Still though…I have this suspicion that defiance to the NS (Nanny State) is intrinsic to the very nature of the French. I remember reading somewhere that when the ban was being introduced in France, some 10.000 + people protested in the streets of Paris. Hence, maybe it’s a combination of geography and culture?
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/328028/laissez-faire
“The origin of the term is uncertain, but folklore suggests that it is derived from the answer Jean-Baptiste Colbert, controller general of finance under King Louis XIV of France, received when he asked industrialists what the government could do to help business: “Leave us alone.” “
Anyway, I’m glad to hear the French are mounting their own kind of résistance to what often seems to me like (and may well actually be) an alien invasion of the entire planet by antismoking zombies. Perhaps the RAF could drop essential supplies of tobacco over occupied France? Or, more appropriately, perhaps the French Air Force – l’Armée de l’Air – could drop essential tobacco supplies over occupied Britain, guided by beacons on the ground comme dans la guerre?
Maybe I should get one of those laser torches so that I can signal to them where to drop the Gitanes and Gauloises. Et les pains au chocolat, et les éclairs, et les croquembouches. Ici, ici! Dans le coin du champ, s’il vous plaît. Vive la France! À bas les anti-fumeurs!
Good for the French for mounting their own résistance! Perhaps the rest of the anti-smoking zombies occupied planet could do as the French do – which basically appears to boil down to saying: “yes – yes” and still continuing on as usual….
The idea using a laser torch might well be copied by the whole of occupied Europe, thus misleading the French Air Force to drop the tobacco supplies almost anywhere….
(btw – number of people having signed the petition against a total smoking ban in Nordrhein Westfalen in Germany is currently 10.598. This petition is open for further 37 days.
http://www.openpetition.de/petition/online/kein-neues-nichtraucherschutzgesetz-in-nordrhein-westfalen )
Almost everybody universally hates a snitch. That is until the anti-tobacco movement decided to use pub and cafe customers as informers. Apparently thousands of people now feel comfortable in the role, yet another vile side effect of the war on smoking.
It’s easier to be snitch in faceless cities like LA, Frisco and NY because due to their size you remain an anonymous snitch. Out in country towns everyone knows what you told. You’ve got to wear the rat tag and you might well find yourself in the emergency ward.
The same holds true for the cops that have to write expensive tickets for a crime that wasn’t a crime not that long ago. The provincial constable lives closer to the townsfolk and feels the wrath. The big city cop writes the ticket, the judge takes over and it simply becomes a dirty money revenue enhancer.
I note that the article used the term ‘exposed to’ as if they’d come in contact with the plague. Oh, the language that they use. This is such a crock. I’ll never get used to this mythical brave new world manufactured out of whole cloth they’ve created. I’ll never see smoking a damned cigarette as a crime. Never ever.
Frank,
The Dutch smoking ban completely failed(thank goodness!).More than half of the pubs allow smoking at some point(but not at any time..mostly after midnight).
Denmark and Germany have only partial smoking bans and I am not sure wether they are strongly enforced.
Not sure if it has anything to do with more law-abiding citizen.
I`d say probably not.
In Holland, as best I understand it, the small bar owners came together (with the help of people like Wiel Maessen) and fought the ban in the courts. And now Holland has a more liberal government which has relaxed the law. These are two things that didn’t happen in Britain. There is also after-hours smoking in quite a few pubs in Britain, just like there has always been after hours drinking.
Frank, the long before they won “officially” they’d already won on the street. When I was over there for the TICAP conference smoking was still illegal in the pubs, but virtually every one I went into in the evenings was filled with people smoking and having a grand old time. Evidently the Dutch don’t believe in snitching — I wonder if it might have anything to do with holdover sentiment from WW2? Although you’d expect such a motive to be just as strong in France, and you’d expect it to be ESPECIALLY strong in the eastern regions of Germany with the Stazi fresh in their memories.
- MJM