Well, now we've done it. Seattle' sick compulsion with public health has reached an apex with our passage of Initiative 901, which will effectively banish smoking from the city forever. You can smoke in your home and in your car (provided the windows are rolled up), and that's about it; the new regulation prohibits smoking in any public place. And forget about ducking outside — you have to be 25 feet from any bar or restaurant in order to light up, a distance that will probably put you in the middle of the street. (There is a kind of loophole: The rules don't apply to passersby, which means that smokers will have to exercise a bit for their nicotine fix.)

I have mixed feelings about the ban. On the one hand, I like my lungs and want to keep them pink(ish) as long as possible. On the other hand, however, there's a part of me that loves smoky bars and always will. It's one of the criteria by which I measure a good dive bar:

  1. Are the drinks strong enough to diminish the pain of existence?
  2. Is the clientele balanced neatly between hipster punk and mumbling wino?
  3. Does the jukebox include AC/DC's "Back in Black"?
  4. Do the bathrooms frighten me?
  5. Is the smoke thick enough as to render the other side of the room fuzzy and indistinct?

I'm afraid that removing one of these criteria will cause many bars, many fine dives, to fall off the list into the chasm of respectability. One day you come in and there are two guys having a head-butting contest to the tune of "Have a Drink on Me"; the following week, there's Gwen Stefani in the air, the management is hosting a speed-dating night and they've hired a dessert chef.

That's a worst-case scenario, of course, but it may not be far off. Even if the purely physical attributes of Seattle's dives don't change, their character indubitably will. Barbara, an employee at the Ballard Smoke Shop, told me that the ban would almost certainly affect the bar's clientele:

"This is their social place," she recently said of the Smoke Shop's older, coffee-and-cigarettes crowd. "If they can't come here and smoke, they'll meet in (somebody's) basement."

My advice to you is to visit as many of Seattle's splendid dive bars as possible before the smoking ban goes into effect on Dec. 8, 2005. An era is ending, and three weeks' worth of secondhand smoke may not kill you. I think.

In any case, we're all about to discover what we never dreamed we would: What do Seattle's bars actually smell like? The mind boggles.

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