They are BTW not my friends, but I would venture to say that non-smokers are beginning to out number smokers even in bars.
There is, however, a bright side -- when the social engineers who run your town decide that the inconvenience of public drunkenness calls for further Draconian restrictions on the remaining drinking establishments, the people who have to sit next to you on the subway won't have to put up with the smell of stale spirits.
In sunny Florida we don't ride no stinkin' subways, we in fact have a long standing tradition of drinking and driving, don't you know.
Your wording here clearly implies that you will benefit from the New York City anti-smoking ordinance. Had you said that others, ie. New Yorkers, would not "have to leave their clothes outside" I would not have assumed, as I quite logically did, that you reside in New York. I trust you see my point here. Anyway, I'm heartened to know that you don't have to live in that hell-hole of a town. :-)
"...but I would venture to say that non-smokers are beginning to out number smokers even in bars."
And therefore, being the majority, are free to dictate to an unpopular minority? Are free to override the wishes of the proprietor himself, who will no longer have the right to permit the use of a legal product in his own establishment?
What you don't seem to realize is that having government ban smoking from bars altogether is neither the best nor the only option here. If operating a non-smoking tavern would generate more traffic and more profit, doesn't it make sense that more of these would already exist? You see, if such bars were more in evidence, there would then be places for tobacco lovers to go, places for tobacco haters to go and places also for those who don't care one way or another. But I have to notice that very few businessmen have bothered to open non-smoking bars. Where they do exist, they are almost always the result of government coercion.