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Anti anti-smoking crew doesn't care how clean the air is in the bars and restaurants, as long as nobody's smoking. The air could be full of likely equally cancer-causing chemicals from an open grill and the anti-smoking types wouldn't bat an eyelash. But let just one person light a cigarette, while standing directly under a ventilation/filtration unit, and they'll all start hacking and coughing.

I come to this conclusion for two reasons: first, noone has ever defined what is a safe or unsafe level of environmental tobacco smoke. Second, I've never heard of a jurisdiction that took ventilation and/or filtration of the air into account when concocting their anti-smoking laws. Heck, a lot of them won't even allow smoking in a separate, ventilated room where the only people who ever enter it are smokers. Conclusion: the health of the public or even employees is not the sole driver behind the smoking bans, despite what they constantly claim. They want to make smokers' lives so inconvenient that it'll force us to give up smoking. In reality what they find is that some of us will continue smoking and give up going to bars and restaurants. (I like to have a smoke when I go to a restaurant, but I can get through a meal without one. There's no way, however, that I'm going to pay good money to drink overpriced beer in a bar where I can't enjoy a cigarette with my beer.)