Jump to full article: Hendersonville (NC) Times-News, 2009-05-15
Intro: Tobacco, even while it was killing people by the thousands, made good money for many a farm family and factory worker. Along with the banks and the cotton mill interests, tobacco held the power in Raleigh to bend the Legislature to its will. Until very recently, the halls of the General Assembly smelled more like a smoking-required zone than a smoke-free zone.
This is the historical context of the vote in the state House on Wednesday night that outlawed smoking in bars and restaurants, effective Jan. 2. In North Carolina!
You would think some titanic battle would have preceded a change of such magnitude in the state that still accounts for roughly half of the total agricultural value of tobacco.
But the bill passed with all the drama of glacial ice melt -- an evolutionary change that happened too slowly to be seen.
. . .
Now restaurants won't have to risk alienating longtime patrons by putting up an inhospitable "No Smoking" sign. The state has done it for them. And the patron can't walk out and find a bar down the street that allows smoking.
It's not to romanticize North Carolina's historic ties to tobacco that we recall the deep green tobacco fields and the tobacco barns that glowed in the night sky.
It is simply to remember, and to realize that this is not our grandfather's North Carolina.
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