New Orleans goes smoke-free: a breath of fresh air or a blow to its character?

[n2doc]

As of today, you can no longer legally smoke a cigarette inside a bar in the world’s drinking capital, New Orleans, Louisiana.

Perhaps you gasped upon reaching the very end of that sentence. City after city have dealt Big Tobacco the harsh blow of banning indoor smoking. But other cities don’t lure in tourist dollars by aggressively advertising a “do watcha wanna”, laissez les bon temps rouler, attitude. An indoor smoking ban here – which also forbids “vaping” – will reap consequences as unique as New Orleans’s cultural ecosystem itself.

“You just opened up a can of whupass on lots of neighbors in the city,” says Nick Scramuzza, one of three owners of Lost Love Lounge in New Orleans’s Marigny neighborhood. Scramuzza doesn’t look forward to the new noise complaints he’ll receive when half of his customers end up spending their time five feet outside his door (the legally mandated distance) enjoying that holy trinity of smoking, drinking and carrying on. Nor is he necessarily in favor of the government bossing everyone around in such a sweeping manner. “But I wake up with a hangover just from working around the smoke,” Scramuzza shrugs. “So I’m excited about the ban.”

As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, New Orleans city government has, since Hurricane Katrina, begun trying to prune some of its cultural shrubbery, turning down the volume a bit. Abetted by uptight neighborhood groups, the city has begun policing bars and nightclubs more strictly, while at the same time fighting a protracted battle to implement a new “noise ordinance” (read: music ordinance) while also debating an impending Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance for the entire city that, to some residents’ dismay, creates more permissive music laws in some instances.

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http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/22/new-orleans-smoke-free-unique-character-smoking-ban