Ever since Ohio enacted its smoking ban, bartenders and their nicotine-loving patrons have been looking for clever ways to evade the new rules. While some bars — which shall remain nameless, of course — have set up smoker’s lounges in their basements, others are simply looking away as customers puff away, assuming that Ohio is too slow and under-funded to actually enforce the rules. But in Minnesota, where a smoking ban was enacted in October, our blue-collared brethren in the North have been forced to get just a tad more creative. …
This article appears in Mar 5-11, 2008.