Maybe we should set up a 'safe smoking site' downtown where they can all go and smoke their cigs and leave the rest of us alone.
My argument to smokers who say that they have a 'right' to smoke in my presence is that if that is the case, then I should have a 'right' to drink beer in their presence.
Since the result of them smoking is blowing smoke out, and they CHOOSE to blow that smoke out where it ends up all over me, well.. the result of my drinking beer is that I have to pee.
So hold still while I pee all over you.
If you go to a bar or pub, which is a place where people socialize and consume their vices (alcohol, etc.), you should expect to have to put up with some of the consequences of it. That includes having to have your ears hurt because the sound is loud, having someone who is drunk puke next to you, tolerating hooliganism, and having to smell cigarette smoke. You don't have to go to a pub or bar. You don't have to eat on the patio.
They brought in anti-smoking legislation because of 2 things: 1) government wants to inhibit you from smoking so you don't tax the medical system, 2) pressure from worker's compensation and insurance type groups to "protect" restaurant staff from "second hand smoke", something that still has not outright proven scientifically to be detrimental to one's health (in fact, it has been shown in case after case of nearly all who get lung cancer, that they were in fact smokers who inhaled cigarettes directly for tens of years). And both these things are the result of the lefty governments you so often whine about, as a right-leaning government is more apt to give you the choice to smoke based on the fact they care more about individual rights and also because of pressure from business groups such as restaurants and the tobacco industry.
Everyone here who is happy about the anti-smoking laws are happy principally because they simply have a distaste for the smell of cigarette smoke, and have swallowed the fancy notion that being anywhere in the vicinity of it is going to cause them lung cancer so they can stand on the moral high ground as well. It is reduced to simply a case of their taste against the taste of others.
The anti-smoking laws benefit few people. It only benefits those who are intolerant of the smell of cigarettes and who outright refuse to merely adjust their presence so they are absent from it. It does not benefit waitresses and other restaurant staff, because though it purports to protect their health, frankly they chose the job out of their own free will and they can just choose another. It does not benefit the medical system, though as the tax payer subsidizes treatment in the event of lung cancer, that subsidy is short-lived as 90% who come down with lung cancer die within 3 months even if they undergo chemotherapy - and it is the smoker who pays the dearest. It does not benefit the insurance industry, for the insured must declare that they are smokers and the insurance rates are adjusted to ensure their profits anyway. It punishes businesses such as the tobacco, entertainment, hospitality and restaurant industry.
There was no reason to enact such legislation except that the basis of it was ideological. And so the sheeple developed the taste motivation out of government run campaigns and adhered to it. What we lost is, once again, over and over, the individual right to treat their own physical person as sovereign and independent from government.