The reasoning for that is simple enough: Smoking can be banned in areas where it is peripheral to the main activity. People go to restaurants to eat and to bars to drink; smoking is something that happens in the course of those activities. What doesn’t make sense is that the inverse should be true: Food should not be served at establishments where smoking is the main objective. Blue Midnight owner Patrick Kent points out that “the way that the law reads, we can serve food, but it has to be ‘shelf stable.’ We can’t serve anything hot, we can’t serve anything cold (and) we can’t serve anything prepared.”

Can’t they get an exemption or something? Make no mistake, it isn’t a huge deal for Blue Midnight. Kent points out that Blue Midnight still sees nearly as many sales as it did before the smoking ban and that “the ban has affected us a little bit, but the bottom line is we still have hookah.” The point might be more for startups such as Saylis Hookah Lounge & Café, 300 N. Clippert St., in Lansing. Owner Mahad Bussuri said restrictions on food being served have decreased sales nearly 40 percent from their pre-smoking ban levels. That’s not cool. A glance at the name of the business, Hookah Lounge & Café, says that these two things go together. To clarify, it means the tobacco smoking is not incidental; it is part of the point of the business.

In my first column supporting the ban, I said, “A bar that closes because of the smoking ban is a bad bar.” I think if Saylis were to go out of business, I would not think it was because it had a bad business model. Instead I would say it is the result of a business falling through the cracks of the law and no one doing anything about it. It isn’t enough to say, “Oh, well the law says this and that is the end of that.” Laws do, on occasion, have unintended consequences. Not being able to serve food at a hookah bar is one of them.

This law was made with at least two strong arguments in mind. The first was that secondhand smoke is harmful to human beings. There are plenty of legitimate studies — besides the Environmental Protection Agency’s and World Health Organization’s — that conclude secondhand smoke is harmful. The second is that there are precedents and guidelines that the government, acting under the auspices of the public’s health, can create laws limiting what can be done inside a private business. Neither of those reasons applies to hookah bars. I think it is in this gray area where we can find a way to responsibly apply the law.

I don’t think it was the express purpose of this law to control food in areas where smoking is allowable, but to control smoke in places where food and drink were served. The special permits granted to “tobacco specialty retail stores” confirm that the issue revolves around use of tobacco and not use of food. If Blue Midnight could serve food before the ban, it doesn’t make sense to ban them from selling it after; nothing has changed. The penalty, in this case, is unfair. To correct it, I would suggest amending the special permit to allow for the serving of all kinds of food within the premises.

I think it would mirror, in some ways, the tavern license approved by the East Lansing City Council for What’s up Dawg?, 301 M.A.C. Ave. Those conditions included things such as a 50 percent food requirement in sales, no less than 10 food items on the menu and no service of beer after midnight.
The point of this law was to protect people gathered in public places, Yes, that had a detrimental effect of some business aspects of both bars and restaurants. But it should not adversely be affecting businesses who are exempt from the legislation’s major points.

David Barker is the State News opinion editor. Reach him at barkerd@msu.edu.