NewsLab

Since the beginning of 2008 Portugal seems crazy about the new anti-tobacco’s law, that forbids smoking inside public buildings, hospitals, schools, work places.
In restaurants and bars is up to the owners: they could decide if people are allowed to smoke inside or not. But for the ones that decide to allow tobacco, they need to install very expensive equipment to extract the smoke from inside, so 95 per cent of the owners choose to forbid smoke.
Although the new legislation is similar to others approved in recent years in many European countries, in Portugal the change brought big discussion – we are “latinos” remember??

Some of our most prominent opinion makers (most of them smokers) said that we are following America’s fundamentalism against tobacco, others said that the government was pushing for a very intrusive law and others even said that not allowing people to smoke in restaurants was an offensive against democracy…
The discussion transformed into controversy after the chief of the agency responsible for the observation of the law was caught smoking inside a casino’s restaurant after midnight in new year’s eve.
As a non smoker, is very pleasant to enjoy a meal in my favourite restaurant without being forced to smell cigars smoke, but it is still very strange to see workers outside their offices smoking desperately while trying to spend not to much time outside…