By Laura Giovanelli and Michael Hewlett
JOURNAL REPORTERs
Historically and culturally, smoking and drinking go together like whiskey and water, gin and tonic, rum and Coke.
It is just after 4 on a sunny Thursday afternoon, and some of the regulars are already gathered at Finnigan’s Wake on Trade Street.
Among them is Allison Chrapek, holding forth while smoking a Pall Mall and nursing a Bud Light.
Asked how long she has smoked, one of her friends jokes that she started right out of the womb. Not quite true, Chrapek said, but she has been smoking for more than 20 years, even as the places where she is allowed to smoke have diminished.
Last week, Gov. Bev Perdue signed into law legislation that will take away something that might have once seemed, especially in tobacco country, an inalienable right – to light up with friends at a bar.
As of Jan. 2, smoking will be banned in all North Carolina restaurants and bars. The legislation marks a historic break with the state’s long and lucrative tobacco legacy. North Carolina is the first major tobacco-producing state to pass such a restrictive ban on smoking. Virginia, which passed a ban earlier, allows smoking in separately vented rooms of bars and restaurants.
Chrapek said that it doesn’t do much good to get too upset.
“It may help me quit smoking,” she said. “I know I should.”
Looking Back
Before cigarettes, it was cigars.
Customers used to offer bartenders a cigar as a friendly gesture because the bartenders weren’t supposed to drink on the job, according to Madelon Powers, a history professor at the University of New Orleans and the author of Faces Along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman’s Saloon, 1870-1920.
In the 1920s, cigarette smoking grew along with the Prohibition-era speak-easies, jazz clubs and cabarets of a nightlife scene. From then on, it also became more acceptable for women to smoke in public, especially in clubs.
“There are classic photographs of jazz musicians playing from the ’40s with curls of smoke … coming up from their cigarettes as they’re getting ready to play their saxophone,” said Lewis Erenberg, a sociology professor at Loyola University Chicago.
But the curls are increasing becoming a thing of the past.
Some people who smoke in bars don’t smoke anywhere else, said David Grazian, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies nightlife culture. The smoking they do is part of their “nocturnal identities,” he said.
“This nightlife persona that they create for themselves involves a dramatic way of dressing and a very public way of behaving,” Grazian said. “And smoking has always played a part in that. It’s always been a way of performing coolness.”
Bumming a cigarette, asking for a light – these are rituals intertwined with nightlife culture, conversation starters and ice breakers.
Loopholes in Ban
It seems unthinkable that North Carolina would ban smoking in restaurants and bars, especially to people in Winston-Salem, home of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.
Many people still recall when downtown smelled of tobacco because of all the manufacturing plants.
Angela Engstrom said she took up smoking 10 years ago when she flew into Winston-Salem from her native Scotland. She said she landed at the airport and just remembered that everyone was smoking.
“I found myself a pub and that was it,” she said last week, while smoking a Marlboro and sipping champagne at the West End Opera House.
Some opponents of North Carolina’s smoking ban argue that there is an apparent elitism written into the ban. Although smoking will be prohibited in all regular bars, including those that charge private-membership fees, two types of establishments are exempted: cigar bars (which must get a certain amount of their revenue from the sale of cigars) and country clubs.
That means that a wealthy smoker will still be able to enjoy a cigar at his country club, but a working stiff can’t have a cigarette at the corner bar.
The loopholes bother Lea Thulberry, the general manager at Finnigan’s Wake. She said that she doesn’t have a problem with the smoking ban, but she doesn’t understand why there are exceptions if the smoking ban was enacted, as legislators said, for health reasons. “It just feels like they’re trying to fool you,” Thulberry said.
State Rep. Hugh Holliman, the chief sponsor of the smoking-ban bill, acknowledged that the exemptions are “somewhat inconsistent.”
But Holliman, D-Davidson, said that he and other supporters of the ban had to agree to the exemptions in order to get the bill passed.
“I would have preferred to make everybody nonsmoking,” Holliman said. “In the legislature, you have to compromise.”
Number of Smokers on Decline
Whether North Carolina’s smoking ban hurts bars and restaurants won’t be known until next year. One thing to keep in mind is that smoking bans don’t necessarily get bargoers to stop smoking. They simply walk outside.
In New York, which has had a ban on smoking in bars and restaurants since 2003, the “walk outside” effect resulted in increased complaints about noise, though that might also have something to do with how dense the city’s business districts are.
Overall, however, there have been numerous studies about public-smoking restrictions, and most have found little effect on either revenue or employment at bars and restaurants.
“There’s an enormous amount of good-quality evidence in the scientific literature that demonstrates that these clean-indoor-air policies have not shown large-scale effects, or even modest effects,” said Elizabeth Klein, a professor of public health at Ohio State University. Klein recently completed a study of local smoking restrictions in Minnesota that showed no meaningful effect on employment after the restrictions were put in place.
North Carolina’s smoking ban also comes as the number of smokers has declined – 20 percent of Americans now smoke, as do 23 percent of North Carolinians. That means that smoking has become less important as a lure for bars.
The ban also could bring back people who now avoid bars because of the smoke – and the souvenir of its smell, lingering on your clothes.
Some smokers say they will still go to their favorite bars, even if they can’t light up.
But Harry Knabb, who was having a smoke last week at Finnigan’s Wake, said that the ban angers him. He said he believes that the danger of secondhand smoke has been overblown. The ban, he said, is government intruding on private business.
“I’ll come here, but I won’t stay as long,” Knabb said. “That’s where I think the erosion will happen.”
An Option for Diehards
If the image of the bar is a haze of smoke amid jazz music or sporting events, there is a positive side to the aroma of tobacco.
Take a deep sniff when you head into a nightclub after Jan. 2. In states where smoking is banned in restaurants and bars, the most prominent scent in nightclubs has become cleaning products, said Grazian, the University of Pennsylvania professor, “whereas cigarette smoke used to be able to cover up glass cleaner, which isn’t the most sensuous of fragrances.”
And what are people to do with their nondrinking hand once the ban takes effect?
Grazian said that cell phones are replacing cigarettes as the crutch of solitary bar- and clubgoers.
“It’s a device that facilitates being alone in public.”
Indeed, there’s even an app for it.
The iPhone’s Electric Smoke application allows users to puff away on a virtual cigarette, which also includes trivia about the health benefits and savings by not lighting up.
