Fort Collins smoking ban could extend outdoors

Lighting up a cigarette in public might soon become even less welcome in Fort Collins.
City officials are considering expanding no-smoking rules to include outdoor dining areas and bar patios.
Smoking also would be prohibited within 20 feet of an outdoor dining area under the proposed regulation, and banned at Transfort bus benches and other transit facilities, such as MAX stations.
During a recent City Council work session on the proposal, most council members said they support applying the smoking ban to outdoor eating areas. They also would consider regulating electronic cigarettes and banning smoking in parks, on trails and in heavily used pedestrian areas such as Old Town Square.
Mayor pro tem Gerry Horak said many people don’t want to be around cigarette smoke, even in an outdoor setting.
“I think the society has changed,” he said. “The society here in town is ready for it.”

Smokers earn 20% less than non-smokers...

Smokers earn 20 per cent less than non-smokers, new research has revealed.
However, people who used to smoke but who gave up more than a year ago earn an average of seven per cent more than those who never smoked.
Economists Julie Hotchkiss and Melinda Pitts, at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, also discovered that the wages of social smokers and people who smoke a pack a day are equally badly affected by their habit.
Therefore, NBC News reports that it is the fact that a person smokes, rather than how much they smoke, that is important.
The economists also found that levels of productivity are not the cause of the pay gap – their research showed that people who smoke heavily are no less productive than people who do not smoke at all.
They suggest that the main reason for the pay gap is that non-smokers tend to be more highly educated than smokers. Cigarette News Online.
The

Licence for smokers

SMOKERS should be made to carry a smart card to buy cigarettes, cancer experts say. In a move backed by Tasmania's Cancer Council, two academics are pushing for the card in a bid to reduce smoking rates. Roger Magnusson, of the University of Sydney's Law School, and David Currow, of the Cancer Institute NSW, say it would cut teenage smoking rates. Retailers would have to check the smart card licence to verify every pack sold is bought by an adult, the authors write in today's Medical Journal of Australia. Professor Magnusson and Professor Currow say the card could collect data smokers could use to help them quit. Cancer Council of Tasmania chief executive Penny Egan said yesterday any move that could reduce the state's high smoking rate was worth considering. Noting Tasmania had the country's highest smoking rate, Ms Egan said: "Quitting smoking is of the most important things an individual can do to reduce the risk of cancer." Tasmanian Health Minister Michelle O'Byrne is considering banning smoking for people born after 2000. A motion supporting the ban, based on an idea floated in the Mercury in May last year by Jon Berrick from the National University of Singapore, has passed the Upper House. Despite smoking being banned for those under 18, the 2010 National Drug Strategy Household Survey found 31 per cent of the tobacco smoked by adolescents was bought from retailers or online. More info about cigarettes click here.