OLD STORY: Smoking is still allowed inside the Oktoberfest beer tents despite growing calls to ban it. The debate around the "blue smog" comes up again and again around Oktoberfest time and this year it’s going to come up again. The smoking lobby (and the Oktoberfest tent owners) say banning smoking in the tents would create more problems than it solves. They claim that making all the smokers go outside whenever they wanted a puff would mean a big fire hazard as there’d be heaps more "traffic jams" around the entrances. Non-smokers say they should just get over it and Oktoberfest should fall into line with the rest of Europe, where bans are encouraging more and more smokers to butt out. But this is Germany, after all. Unfortunately smoking is still regarded here as more of a social habit than the dirty, destructive addiction it’s though of in say, Los Angeles or Sydney.
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