Originally Posted by
Dovster
I have been a smoker for the past 53 years and I can't think of a single way that it is beneficial. As somedude3210 said, discussing whether smoking is good or bad for you is not the purpose of this proposed forum. In fact, I think that whoever moderates it should remove any posts which take either viewpoint.
Go to Omni if you want to discuss the pros or cons of smoking. (I would be interested in finding any pros which might exist.)
When I first raised this issue, I said that the entire purpose of the forum is to help smokers find travel facilities (hotels, airports, car rental agencies, restaurants, etc) where they will be allowed to smoke.
These will be constantly changing. A couple of years ago I could not smoke in MXP -- today, I can. On the other hand, there used to be two HHonors hotels in the Atlanta airport area where smoking was allowed. Today there are none.
Non-smokers are probably not aware of where smoking is or is not allowed -- at least not to the degree that smokers are. A forum providing such information, and threads about particular locations being updated as the situation changes, would be very helpful to smokers -- and certainly will not take anything away from non-smokers.
From the beginning, I saw potential for nonsmokers to benefit from the proposed new forum by being able to see where the antismoking regulations aren't enforced and where hotels, restaurants, outdoor cafes and places for outdoor public events, etc. might surprisingly not be totally nonsmoking.
Just as smokers want and need to find places that permit smoking, people who are especially sensitive to smoke need and want to find places that were not proviously occupied by smokers and where there are not going to be smokers nearby.
If such information were also available and discussed from this perspective, the proposed new forum could be very valuable to even more FT members. Otherwise I fear that we'll also need a Nonsmoking Section if the scope of the Smoking Section cannot be defined in a way that nonsmokers are also welcome to come here to gather information about where there might be surreptitious smoking or smoking nearby. Of course, in any event, discussions about whether people should smoke would need to be strongly forbidden.