One aspect of Indianapolis’s recently-amended smoking ordinance is that it is a ban. Unless a person is a member of a private club, or is in a casino or off-track betting establishment (referred to as a "satellite" in the ordinance) she or he cannot smoke a cigarette inside the premises of a business in this county. Cigar smokers still can smoke, but only in (again) private clubs that vote to allow smoking or cigar bars. Cigarette smokers cannot smoke in cigar bars.

   The Indy Cigar Bar is a fine establishment. I love the establishment’s humidor. I have been to cigar bars in Denver and Washington, D.C. Never before had I encountered a cigar bar that banned cigarettes from being smoked. That was the choice of the owner of the Indy Cigar Bar.

   The Indianapolis-Marion County that incorporates the ban on cigarettes makes no sense in several respects, but here in light of the stated purpose of the amended ordinance. The first section of the ordinance asserts concerns over maladies from so-called second-hand smoke ("SHS").

   First, the studies that find "harm" from SHS have serious methodological flaws. The EPA’s study, as one example, set out harm from SHS as an a priori truth before it went on, impliedly with an objective view, to examine whether SHS causes harm. In an analysis, that means "from seemingly self-evident propositions to particular conclusions." Black’s Law Dictionary, pocket ed., 1996. The EPA took as a conclusion that which it sought to study. The EPA’s study has come to be criticized sharply by epidemiologists and Federal courts alike. Other studies have failed to meet epidemiological criteria for validity.

   Second, the ordinance sets out as its raison d’etre elimination of smoke from the work environment for those employees of an establishment in which smoking is allowed who themselves do not smoke. (1) The attack on the studies that purport to show harms from second-hand smoke still are flawed; and (2) The employees of establishment in which the ordinance allows smoking apparently are chopped liver.

   Bars that catered to a clientele that smokes have been hit hard by the ban. The ordinance was a bad idea. Such bans have been repealed in other cities once the citizens realized the negative effects of the bans to business.

   If someone does not want to enter an establishment—a bar—that allows smoking, that person does not have to enter. In the meantime, the market had worked the number of bars that allowed smoking down. Let the market work.