Dear SF: Leave Us Smokers Alone

Bar patios, perhaps the last bastions of public smoking in San Francisco, are crucial to retaining their diehard, loyal clientele. No restaurants allow it and few cafés have the sidewalk real estate to support smoking far enough from the entrance. Even Dolores Park rangers can bust you for it. However, a push for an outright smoking ban covering an establishment’s entire premises, even the patio, is seeing resistance, especially from me.

This new anti-smoking law was supposed to come under discussion at a land use and transport meeting on June 8. However, following uproar from business owners whose livelihood depends on holding space for smokers, legislation is on hold. Officially, the term is “continued,” meaning paused until further notice, which I may or may not remember from traffic court. SF supervisors are staying tight-lipped about the subject while they await cues from the Mayor. 

As of now, it appears that the proposed smoking ban is likely out for the summer. The question then becomes, Will it stay that way? Over fifty Bay Area cities already instituted a total smoking ban. What would the city’s dining and nightlife establishments do if legislation drives away their last, most faithful demographic? 

I stopped smoking after eleven years. It was 2015. I was 25 years old. I say “stopped,” not “quit,” because I’ll still smoke a cigarette, but only in Paris, where the custom is de rigeur. But smoking connotes something different in the US. In much of Europe, it remains embedded in the culture, a social activity across ages, genders and classes. The same is true in the states (e.g. cigarette moms). Here however, one doesn’t start smoking to enter mainstream culture, but make an exit to a smaller, more welcoming alternative. I might’ve stopped smoking, but I never left the group of friends that steps out to smoke every twenty minutes. 

The relationship between SF’s bars and their clientele is already strained. Many establishments, like the gay bar I worked at for two years, are still chasing pre-COVID success. Certain business owners will reduce their deficit by increasing cover and drink prices, passing the crisis onto you. It backfires on everyone behind the bar; customers who drink less tip less, especially if they feel gouged. Now imagine you’ve taken away the last few square feet where customers may smoke. 

Much like North Beach Business Association President Stuart Watts told KQED, “This ordinance would not reduce smoking. It will relocate it.” Indeed. It might even deter customers from going out altogether. North Beach is one San Francisco neighborhood where café culture continues to lend the city its European character. No wonder Watts is worried. “We are also deeply concerned about the enforcement burden this ordinance places on small business owners.”

California has legally required all public spaces be smoke-free since 1995. A total smoking ban took effect in 2016. Aside from the cold or wind, this is why no friends-group can agree to plant themselves indoors or out. And that’s where the patio comes in. Our offensive exhalations, once pooled in the rafters of shared confined spaces, now scatter to the winds above El Rio. Stepping out of your legally mandated clean-air bubble and onto the patio entails putting up with smokers. If that’s not good enough, then it was never about secondhand smoke—you’re just a wet blanket. 

Nobody is suggesting that smoking is healthy. It isn’t. But as a former cigarette smoker/current pot smoker, allow me to explain something: We know. We’ve always known. It’s why we had a dedicated section in restaurants to begin with. But, in all fairness, most were poorly ventilated, and I felt for your pinkberry lungs. So once you got your way and banned smoking in restaurants and bars, I felt we ceded enough ground. 

As a Native American, I should’ve recognized a forced removal when I saw one. I remember being driven from our ancestral smoking sections outside to the curb, at least ten feet from the restaurant’s front entrance. We withstood cold, whipping winds while you precious non-smokers warmed your lips with house coffee refills and delicious Moons-Over-My-Hammy. But it wasn’t enough, it’s never enough. Right as we assemble a community of oddballs who can weather the weather for a smoke, you normies have to fuck it up. 

I think it’s selfish, honestly. Non-smokers won their bars, restaurants, courtyards and almost every other public space, so why not just let smokers be? You picked your battle, now march in your lane. So what, your interesting friends leave you indoors to chat while something burns between their fingers. I see the FOMO behind your fake, passive-aggressive cough-cough. You really want to save your breath? Stop trying to shame a crowd into giving up a habit they chose knowingly well before you came complaining.