Posted on 09/27/2007 6:00:13 PM PDT by fanfan
Vancouver's hookah-parlour owners are celebrating after winning an exemption Thursday from a proposed new bylaw that will ban smoking on most sidewalks in commercial districts, in bus shelters and even in taxis passing through Vancouver.
In giving the bylaw unanimous approval-in-principle, Vancouver city council members bowed to arguments that hookah lounges provide an important cultural space for the city's Muslims and granted them a temporary exemption.
The bylaw, which provides for fines of $100 to $2,000, won't come into effect until the legal department has drafted Thursday's amendments. No firm date for its implementation has been set.
Hamid Mohammadian, operator of the Persian Teahouse on Davie Street, thanked council for the exemption.
"We are very happy because this is our culture. I have one customer, 75 years old, who said 'I will have no other place to go if you close,'" he said.
Mohammadian brought two hookah pipes to show council. They included a 600-year-old model with a ceramic mosaic on the outside, fruit-flavoured tobacco, and charcoal to the meeting to show councillors what was at stake.
Emad Yacoub, who runs five restaurants in Vancouver, also attended Thursday's meeting to ask council to protect hookah lounges.
"I support no smoking on the patios," he said, saying it will make it easier for him since he won't have to settle fights between his smoking and non-smoking customers.
But he said hookah lounges are essential for immigrants from hookah-smoking cultures, because it helps them deal with the depression common for newcomers and gives them places like they have at home.
Unlike other immigrants, they can't go to bars because their religion prohibits them from drinking alcohol.
"I took my cousin there and I only saw a smile on his face when I took him to a hookah lounge because that is what we do back home."
City council also agreed that the city's two cigar shops, which have special smoking rooms, can operate until everyone finds out what the province's new anti-smoking regulations will be.
But Vancouver's planned new bylaw will prohibit smoking in any taxi travelling through Vancouver, even if the driver and all the passengers don't have a problem with it and even if the taxi is licensed in another municipality.
It will also prohibit smoking within six metres of any entryway, window or air intake for a public building, which will effectively ban smoking on most sidewalks in commercial areas, since sidewalks are only three metres wide and doors are often less than six metres apart.
And it will prohibit smoking on restaurant patios and at bus shelters.
The one foggy point in the new bylaw was whether it will apply to crack cocaine and crystal-meth smoking.
One disgruntled speaker, Angela Giannoulis, suggested sarcastically that she hoped the new bylaw would mean she wouldn't have to put up with crack and crystal-meth smokers outside her family's cigar-distribution business in Strathcona, while it forces her employees to go to dangerous alleys to smoke cigarettes and threatens to shut the cigar rooms for her customers.
But health-protection director Domenic Losito said he didn't think so, since the bylaw is aimed at cigarette smoke.
Coun. Suzanne Anton noted the bylaw refers to the smoking of "tobacco or other weed or substance."
Losito said he would have to check with the city's legal department about whether the bylaw will cover non-tobacco products.
Anton and Coun. Tim Stevenson, who are from the city's two main opposing parties, came up jointly with a motion to exempt the hookah lounges and cigar rooms temporarily.
The province is coming up with its own new non-smoking regulations, but they aren't finalized yet and it is unclear whether or not they will cover cigar-store smoking rooms or hookah lounges.
Ping
One kind if Nazi (anti-smoking) meets another kind of Nazi (Moose-limbs) — must be professional courtesy.......
Go ask Alice ...
HUH?????
So what about the Marlboro man? Doesn’t he deserve the same cultural space? This PC crap is going to be the death of the world as we know it.
One of the "positives" of the shameless pandering to Muslim immigrants might be in rolling back some of the smoking bans. I've been to many Islamic countries and those people are serious smokers. You can smoke everywhere --elevators, restrooms, shopping malls, airports, etc...
600 years ago, there was no tabacco in the “old world.” The hookah was\is used for smoking hashish.
The term ‘Assassin’ is generally assumed to be derived from its connections to the Hashshashin, a militant religious sect of Ismaili Muslims, thought to be active in the Middle East in the 8th to 14th centuries. This mystic secret society killed members of the Abbasid elite for political or religious reasons.[3]
Stories claim that these early assassins were drugged during their murders, often with materials such as hashish and opium. The name assassin is derived from either hasishin for the supposed influence of the drugs, and disregard for their own lives in the process, or hassansin for their leader, Hassan-i-Sabah.
600 years ago, there was no tabacco in the “old world.” The hookah was\is used for smoking hashish.
The term ‘Assassin’ is generally assumed to be derived from its connections to the Hashshashin, a militant religious sect of Ismaili Muslims, thought to be active in the Middle East in the 8th to 14th centuries. This mystic secret society killed members of the Abbasid elite for political or religious reasons.[3]
Stories claim that these early assassins were drugged during their murders, often with materials such as hashish and opium. The name assassin is derived from either hasishin for the supposed influence of the drugs, and disregard for their own lives in the process, or hassansin for their leader, Hassan-i-Sabah.
Automobile exhaust? Have they banned that yet?
and
City council also agreed that the city's two cigar shops, which have special smoking rooms, can operate until everyone finds out what the province's new anti-smoking regulations will be.
Hasn't smoking tobacco products been a traditional part of the cultures of the Americas, going back to the Native inhabitants, shouldn't it be protected under the same protections offered the Persian Hookah fans? Rhetorical really. Wow. Nothing to see here, nope, no favoritism or special treatment for one group over others...
Where, exactly, are these cigar bars you've noticed?
ML/NJ
Mark up another win for the ROP.
I’ve also noticed that the likelihood of meeting a belly-dancer is greater in a hookah lounge.
Bend over and let them stick you in the butt again. Are people stupid? What next? Maybe we shouldn’t tax them because it may be against muslim law. Maybe we shouldn’t charge them interest on loans.....this is against muslim law, they can’t charge each other interes.....according to what I hear.
Take your bongs to the streets - filled with tobacco,of course.
Ping.
What's the reason for this doglike groveling everywhere in the West? It's like a mass psychosis.
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