Ban damage update…
They got ’em, so they’re smoking ’em
6/12/12
By Christian Schneider
To many state residents, Highway 29 represents the line of demarcation between “Wisconsin” and “Northern Wisconsin.” And nothing tells the story of the cultural divide between the northern and southern ends of the state better than the taverns that dot the stretch of highway between Eau Claire and Wausau. Yet despite their innocent look, these little saloons have become laboratories for prohibition-style civil disobedience in Wisconsin.
These watering holes aren’t hard to find; generally, all one has to do is drive down the town’s designated main drag to run across “the bar.” And while they look like typical taverns found around the state, they feature one item missing from the big city bars: They are adorned with ashtrays.
In early 2009, the Wisconsin Legislature banned smoking in all bars and restaurants in the state. Previously, the state was a pastiche of local smoking bans, each of which attempted to protect workers in bars and restaurants from the dangers of secondhand smoke.
The City of Madison’s hysterical tobacco ban was so tight, it even applied to chewing tobacco. One Common Council member called a giant bucket of spit an even greater hazard than secondhand smoke. “I’m picturing a little inebriated (person) with a stubbed toe kicking a spittoon by accident and all that sloshing over it into an open wound,” said Ald. Judy Compton in 2006.
The state smoking ban made anti-smoking laws uniform throughout Wisconsin, but clearly news hasn’t reached many taverns in the northern portion of the state. In one bar in a small town just off the highway, a slim, 6-foot-3 bartender leans over and takes a long drag off her heater as she tells us the story of how she was once on “The Jerry Springer Show.” I mention the smoking ban and how it is supposed to save bar employees from breathing secondhand smoke while at work. “Nobody said I had to work here!” she says, taking another drag. Clearly, she prefers her smoke firsthand.
At the end of the bar sits the owner, a woman originally from Peoria, Ill., who looks to be in her late 50s – although judging by the number of cigarettes she is sucking down, she could be younger but is wearing an extra decade of nicotine on her face. She considers herself a Democrat but objects to the nanny mentality that the smoking ban represents. She considers state lawmakers telling her what she can and can’t do on her own property to be outright theft. The patrons at her tavern are a tight-knit community – she boasts that even the local cops stop in for a smoke after their shifts are over.
Even if she were to be caught, the penalty for bar owners who don’t stop people from smoking in their establishments is only $100, and they can only be cited once per day. A warning is all that can be issued to a tavern that hasn’t previously been cited. Individuals who smoke in bars also can be issued citations of between $100 and $250, but it is clear that in bars all over Wisconsin, a strict “no-snitching” policy is in effect.
The lesson here is one that we all learned during Prohibition: As long as a vice exists, there will be somewhere to take part in it, legally or otherwise. And as long as there are more taverns than there are state officials able to enforce the laws passed in Madison, there will always be a robust defiance of those laws.
“The Legislature passed it; now let them enforce it,” appears to be the guiding principle in towns such as Boyd, Cadott, Stanley, Owen, Abbotsford and the no-stoplight municipalities like them.
As for the bar owner I talked to, she considers smoking in bars as culturally endemic to Wisconsin as beer and cheese. And if the state wants to come cite her, it’ll have to pry the fine out of her cold, dead, nicotine-stained hand.
Antismoker allegedly punches man outside tavern
