On Friday night, when you stop by your neighborhood bar for a drink, you might notice something seems a little different. The same three guys are sitting at the bar that sit there every other night, and the jukebox is still playing someone’s questionably bad selection. But you breathe in, and it’s no longer the traditional smoky haze that leaves you smelling like an ashtray. It’s clean air — at least in most Eugene bars.
More than a year ago, amid an excess of media coverage and local debate, the Eugene City Council made the decision to prohibit smoking in public establishments, effective in bars on Jan. 1, 2002. As the deadline loomed closer, many of the bars in town became construction zones as bar owners raced against the clock to finish construction on covered smoking decks or rooms. And as we rang out 2001, we also said goodbye to smoking in bars and hello to a smoke-free 2002.
Personally, the smoke-free thing doesn’t seem like a hard concept. If you smoke, do it outside or in the designated areas. But several Eugene bars are claiming it’s too difficult for their clientele to comprehend or for their staff to enforce. The owner of O’Donnell’s Irish Pub, Shon O’Donnell, complained in a Jan. 19 Register-Guard article that he’s constantly reminding patrons not to light up. And when they do? He slides them an ashtray and tells them they can’t smoke in the bar.

Does anyone else see this as a mixed message? Local customers know they can’t smoke in restaurants and bars. With the amount of media coverage and political debate that the local controversy has seen in the past year and a half, it would be hard for a recluse to claim ignorance. Yet in several bars — including O’Donnell’s and Max’s Tavern — bar owners are claiming that they can’t seem to stop customers from smoking. Of course, when you’re providing ashtrays at the bar, it tends to send customers a message that doesn’t exactly coincide with the new anti-smoking ban.
I don’t buy the excuse that it’s too “tough” for bar owners and workers to “police” their customers smoking habits. It’s a bar, and bartenders typically deal with bigger problems than asking a customer to step outside for a smoke — such as cutting off an unruly inebriated patron or breaking up fights. They seem to do a pretty good job of announcing last call at 2 a.m. or pulling drinks at 2:15 a.m. And why? Because no bar wants to lose its liquor license for breaking laws regarding alcohol distribution. No license, no livelihood. If they tied smoking violations to losing a liquor license, bartenders would be armed with fire extinguishers to put out “illegal” cigarettes.
So why is everyone whining about being fined? After all, they are breaking the law. From the complaints aired in the Register-Guard article, you’d think that the Lane County Health Department is sneaking around in trench coats, peering through back windows in a sneaky effort to catch patrons with cigarettes. In reality, alleged infractions are investigated only when someone calls Lane County’s no-smoking complaint line. And it’s those filing complaints that are telling a different story than the bar owners who received fines this past week.
The bars that are receiving citations are breaking the law, and they are doing it on purpose. Regardless of how they are fined or who files a complaint, it doesn’t change the fact that it is the bar that’s breaking the law. The majority of Eugene bars are complying. What makes a handful of resisters so special?