Dear Kaiserslautern: you really need this

Dear Kaiserslautern:

can I just say how disappointing it is that so many of your bars/restaurants allow smoking inside them? For the most part, smoking is not allowed inside but thanks to special interest lobbying, there are a ton of loopholes that allow certain establishments to have smoking areas.

This means that one can't enjoy a drink with friends at a bar without choking on the smoke and smelling as if one has rolled around in an ashtray. Even worse, that means that the waitstaff can potentially sicken from lung cancer by proxy. In the meantime, they can develop asthma and other lung issues.

It is surprising how many establishments in Kaiserslautern allow smoking. I'm not exaggerating when I say that one would be hard-pressed to grab a drink at a bar without getting "smoked." Why can't the smokers go outside to enjoy their vice?

Oh, and I don't want to hear that there are the smokers' rooms and those are sufficient. Unless there's an airlock and separate HVAC systems, smoke from these rooms escapes into the main area and we still have to breathe that crap.

Hardrock-Cafe (yes, I see you trying to rip off the name of the real chain - lame!) doesn't even try to preserve the aura of the "smoking" room. We sat in the "non-smoking" room, whose door was left open into the smoking area (i.e. the bar, and where one enters the building). I asked to close the door because the smoke was entering but the staff wouldn't do it because they had to walk through. I ended up leaving because I couldn't breathe with the clouds of smoke hanging in the room.

Since most of the coffee shops and cafes close early here (you'd think we were a town of 10,000 and not a city of 10 times that), there really aren't many non-smoking options of somewhere to be cozy and hunker down with one's friends out in public for some drinks.

Consider this, Kaiserslautern: it would be good for everyone's health, and probably for business, too, to fully ban smoking. I've heard from so many other people who won't visit these places that allow smoking, either.

Signed, someone who doesn't want to choke on smoke