WASHINGTON -- Mayor Bloomberg's New York is only the most prominent example of a city recently fallen victim to a bad idea whose time has come: smoking bans in bars and restaurants. Bans have been imposed statewide in California, Florida, and Delaware, and even deep in tobacco country, in Lexington, Kentucky. This year, the movement came to Washington, D.C. Backed by a $250,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the antismoking activists of Smokefree D.C. began lobbying the city council. Surely a well-funded effort to extend the ban to the nation's health conscious capital couldn't fail. Or could it?...
