Clearing The Air

Wednesday, May 07, 2008

Black Hawk Cigar Bar and Casino gets personal "attention" from Colorado state lawmakers

.....that personal attention results in state legislation designed:

to pass a state law whose sole aim and purpose was to shaft (screw over) one, single small businessman.

Read the entire vindictive story here.

What he was operating, it turned out according to state law, was a cigar bar.

That his cigar bar just happened to have 216 slot machines in it, he realized, well, who was he to argue with legal definitions?

"Keep smoking," he told his patrons.

It worked.

The city attorney promptly studied Ed Smith's financial books and the $300,000 a year he was pulling in from tobacco sales, finishing up with an inspection of his humidors. Cigar bar, the city attorney ruled. The state Division of Gaming, soon enough, arrived at the same conclusion: cigar bar.

It all came crashing down on Friday afternoon when Senate Bill 225, sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Ken Gordon, D-Denver, which would outlaw gaming devices in cigar bars, sailed through a final House committee hearing ahead of deliberation on Monday before the full House.

Someone, Ed Smith believes, has it in for him, and gamed the system to get the legislature to do what it almost never does: target a single individual.

The lesson here is that you don't cross rent seeking legislation funded by the pharmaceutical nicotine (Nicoderm) interests. Namely, Nicoderm manufacturer Johnson & Johnson Company's Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). When RWJF funds the pro-smoking ban, non-profit, activists to the tune of $446 million for personal marketing interests........liberal legislators mysteriously feel compelled to obey their rent seeking master.

Even though air quality test results by Johns Hopkins University, the American Cancer Society, a Minnesota Environmental Health Department, and various researchers whose testing and report was peer reviewed and published in the esteemed British Medical Journal......prove that secondhand smoke is 2.6 - 25,000 times SAFER than occupational (OSHA) workplace regulations:

http://cleanairquality.blogspot.com/2010/09/new-st-louis-aq-study-published-by.html

http://cleanairquality.blogspot.com/2007/11/johns-hopkins-air-quality-testing-of.html

http://cleanairquality.blogspot.com/2007/04/bmj-published-air-quality-test-results.html

http://cleanairquality.blogspot.com/2004/04/american-cancer-society-test-results.html

http://cleanairquality.blogspot.com/2006/02/air-quality-testing-and-secondhand.html

http://cleanairquality.blogspot.com/2008/03/british-medical-journal-who-conclude.html

All nullify the argument that secondhand smoke is a workplace health hazard.