Justice
Outdoor Smoking Bans: Impossible to Enforce, or Inevitable?
Declaring public space smoke-free is becoming exponentially more common. Enforcing it is not.
For 48 percent of the U.S. population [PDF], and in 30 of the country's 50 largest cities, lighting up in restaurants, bars, and offices is not only banned, it's a fading memory, as distant as typewriters and rotary phones.
It has not been the same story on the next frontier of smoking bans, those that seek to stop people from lighting up outdoors. Over a thousand U.S. cities and counties (and several states) have some type of smoke-free law indoors [PDF], and hundreds more have laws regulating smoking in public parks [PDF]. But amid the endless variety — no two jurisdictions, it seems, have quite the same laws — only a handful of places have banned smoking outright in outdoor public space.