 Plus: the story behind the world’s largest-selling pipe
Los Angeles, March 24 – One of the small benefits of the various smoking bans and pending legislation in the U.S. and around the world has been a lot of thoughtful commentary on how cigar smokers should react.
Obviously, smoking bans – all aimed primarily at cigarettes – are a pain. And even when smoking is allowed in some state or country, how many times have you seen the notice at the bottom of the menu, “No cigars or pipes, please.”
This issue was tackled head-on by Cigar Buyer editor Dominic Roskrow in his most recent editorial for the British tobacco-trade magazine:
“[C]igar smokers should withdraw from any broad coalition and put as much blue water between themselves and other smokers.”
Really? Roskrow continues:
”Call it snobbery, but let’s be honest, our alliance with the cigarette smoker was nothing more than a marriage of convenience, was it?
“When did cigarette smokers jump up and down in support of pipe and cigar smokers when they were permitted to smoke and we were not?
Finally, this:
”[T]hat’s why we have to urge the British government to stop short of the complete ban, to allow smoking where no food is being served, and to not only allow but to encourage a segregated smoking room.
“This presents the opportunity for the widespread introduction of cigar lounges. And this in turn will benefit the cigar sector overall – for the evidence suggests that if you’re going to all the trouble of moving rooms to smoke you start to place the quality of the occasion above the quantity.”
Maybe this will work in Britain, but not in the U.S. For American lawmakers and the anti-tobacco movement in this country, smoking is smoking and tobacco is evil.
Politicians have the good sense to remember Prohibition and how banning alcoholic beverages from 1920-33 only created the speakeasy and organized crime on a national basis. So, tobacco won’t be banned outright. But the new legislation proposed in the U.S. Senate and coming in the U.S. House to award the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authority over tobacco products is a clever substitute.
The base issue in the U.S. must be freedom. If I am a smoker, consuming a legal product, I should be able to have places to enjoy such consumption. Although widely available, alcoholic beverage consumption is controlled. There are bars and restaurants and you can also enjoy such beverages at home, but drinking on the street is a crime in more places than not.
Smoking should be the same. Although the “science” behind the secondhand smoke argument is dubious at best (and that’s being charitable), there’s no reason for the non-smoking public – a majority for sure – to have to be inundated with smoke (or drunks for that matter).
So, we need to have our own places. In this, Roskrow is right, and in California – the most virulent anti-tobacco state of them all – this exception is written into the state’s anti-smoking law. A legislative staff manager named J.J. Kaplan is the hero, having convinced then-State Assemblyman Terry Friedman in 1994 to exempt “retail or wholesale tobacco shops and private smokers’ lounges” in his bill prohibiting smoking in public places in the state.
But the law should be expanded to allow establishments which serve food, or conduct other business, to allow smoking if that business desires and warnings are placed on all entrances and exits of the building or facility in which that business exists. There should be smoking bars and non-smoking bars. Italian restaurants which allow smoking and those (most) who do not. Smoking-permitted carpet stores and non-smoking carpet stores.
It should be up to the market.
And the number of smoking-permitted facilities will be small, since most people do not smoke and prefer to be in a smoke-free environment.
The time is coming for this as state and local government grow ever more thirsty for tobacco tax revenue. With smoking declining in state after state, so are tobacco taxes. Pretty soon, governments are going to have to allow smoking somewhere in order to keep those tax dollars coming in. Listening, Rob Reiner?
Pipe Dreams:
Although we don’t pay too much attention to pipes here, the recent issue of Tobacconist magazine – published for the tobacco trade – had a wonderful article on the manufacture of the most famous pipe of them all.
Not Dunhill, you briarhead. Dr. Grabow!
Distributed by Lane Limited of Tucker, Georgia, Dr. Grabow pipes are made in Sparta, North Carolina in a relatively new factory, opened in 1978. The Dr. Grabow brand dates back to 1933, and although there is some mystery to the naming of the brand, the most reasonable story is that Louis Linkman got his friend Dr. Paul Grabow – a dentist – to agree to lend his name to the product in return for a lifetime supply of the pipes.
Besides its value pricing, one of the unique aspects of the Dr. Grabow line is that all of them are “pre-smoked.” That is, each pipe goes through a machine which dumps in loose tobacco, lights the bowl and “smokes” the tobacco through an aerator.
All of the 12 Dr. Grabow lines use briar for the bowls and either plastic, rubber or vulcanite for the stems.
How many are sold each year? The article indicates that 350,000 Dr. Grabows are produced annually, sold mostly through drugstores and convenience stores nationwide. Now you know.
~ Rich Perelman
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