Smokers aren’t welcome in Vancouver (unless it’s pot)

[psychegram]

A revealing piece on anti-smoking fascism in Vancouver, Canada's smoking hypocrisy capital.

_http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/brian-hutchinson-smokers-arent-welcome-in-vancouver-unless-its-pot

The lead:

Smokers aren’t welcome in sanctimonious Vancouver. Everyone knows that. Most are also aware of this: The city’s sweeping smoking bans are applied to tobacco and any other substance that isn’t cannabis.

Tokers rule the roost in Canada’s most pot-friendly city, where people routinely partake of their favourite marijuana-based products, in any number of special lounges and shops. It’s been going on for years.

The situation and the city’s blatant hypocrisy drive Abbas Abdiannia nuts. They are driving him to ruin. It’s astonishing he hasn’t already been drummed out of business by Vancouver’s unbending anti-anything-but cannabis bureaucrats and politicians.

Abdiannia owns Ahwaz Hookah House, one of the city’s last surviving, Persian-style smoking joints. It’s all ersatz these days; smoking or burning any material, tobacco-laced or otherwise, inside his cozy little hookah room is forbidden. Abdiannia offers a bland facsimile instead, the electronic vapour experience. Instead of puffing on traditional shisha via glass water-pipes, customers suck back scented, nicotine-free herbal gas, using an electronic vaporizing device imported from the United States.

Despite the proprietor bending over backwards to comply, they're still shutting him down. He went on a hunger strike: no one cared. Meanwhile, people can smoke marijuana more or less anywhere they please. I think this demonstrates, once again, that protestations that smoking bans are about public health are entirely hollow ... there's something else going on here.

 

[duyunne]

I walk through quite the diverse crowd of tobacco smokers almost daily at Metrotown on my way to the train. I don't think the common GVR folk really care and will smoke whenever, whatever they want.

But... This struggle that Abbas Abdiannia is facing is certainly coming from outside this common caste. Basically, I never knew about this! Thanks for the post. It's quite disturbing to be honest...