No Smoking: Are counter-revolutionary forces afoot?

It has now been nine months since the smoking ban went into effect in French workplaces.  Speaking as a non-smoker who enjoys the simple pleasures of life—like breathing—I have to say that it’s made a marked improvement in the office environment—since I can now breathe and even see much better—but counter-revolutionary forces just may be afoot.

I arrived here before the workplace smoking ban, back in what is now seen by many French smokers as the good ole days.  Arriving at my new job, I would introduce myself as Mexican-American and receive reactions of either extreme positivism or extreme negativism for the latter and utter ambivalence for the former.  One of the main anti-American gripes I heard from my French co-workers was about smoking.  They would incessantly criticize American anti-smoking rules (and American anti-smoker culture), explaining at length that here in France, they enjoy a more enlightened system that admits the dangers of smoking, but leaves the decision up to the individual.  They viewed it very much as an issue of personal freedom, just as how we think of freedom of speech—you have the right to decide for yourself, even if you make the wrong decision or exercise your rights to your own detriment.

Then all of that was turned on its head.  Study after study proved that even the people who didn’t freely choose to smoke (i.e., the second-hand smokers like me) were literally dying by the thousands because of that freedom.  This political realization of seemingly obvious scientific fact led to the new rules, outlawing smoking in the workplace as of February 2007, and in restaurants and bars starting in February 2008. 

Of course, a new rule doesn’t always bring about an entirely new reality.  In my workplace, compliance is almost 100% among support staff and mid-level employees, but a little spottier higher up the ladder.  It has also opened up an entirely new avenue for alpha males to stake their territory and authority during meetings, especially those involving tough negotiations.  You may recall an earlier article in which I explained a certain workplace dress code phenomenon that I’ve witnessed—an alpha male tendency to dress down (for example, foregoing a tie even though everyone else wears one) just to say “I’m so important that I don’t care what you think.”  Similarly, I’ve seen alpha negotiators flaunt the no-smoking rule just to say “I’m a rebel; don’t #*@% with me.”  These people tend not to be my bosses, but rather our clients, so nobody is ever going to tell them to put it out.  Quite to the contrary, as soon as a client lights up, my boss goes running off to find an ashtray.  Maybe we’re facilitating anti-social, criminal behavior, but it makes the client look big and powerful, which is sometimes all we’re getting paid for anyway.

And out on the streets, there’s ample evidence all around that, even if compliance isn’t perfect, a lot of people are changing their ways.  New workplace rules implementing the smoking ban tend to say that smokers, now prohibited from smoking in the office, can either step out onto a balcony or smoke outside on the sidewalk.  Both of these options are literally transforming the cityscape of certain business-heavy parts of the city, where many office doorways are now clogged with gaggles of smokers and office balconies that have gone unused for centuries are now packed with little clusters of addicts.

Incidentally, the cluttered balconies worry me a bit: since most of those balconies have scarcely been used since the Revolution and now host frenzied butt-stomping groups of antsy, fidgety office workers all day long, won’t a balcony eventually give way, sending a half-dozen smokers plummeting to their non-cancerous deaths below?  If so, they could be the poster-children of the counter-revolution, so breathe deep right now, before they take that right away from you.